Procurement and technical-supply terms

How a purchase actually moves, in the language buyers and distributors use for it.

RFQRequest for quotation

An RFQ is a buyer's request for a price and lead time on a specific list of items, sent to one or more suppliers. It differs from an RFP in that the requirement is already defined: the buyer is not asking how to solve a problem, only what these exact items cost and when they arrive. The free supplier console

RFPRequest for proposal

An RFP is a buyer's request for proposed solutions to a stated problem, evaluated on approach as well as price. Technical supply rarely uses one for consumables; it appears for capital equipment, service contracts and framework agreements.

Purchase orderPO

A purchase order is the buyer's binding instruction to a supplier to deliver specified goods at agreed prices and terms. It is the document that turns an accepted quote into a commitment, and it is issued by the buyer to the distributor — never to or by a software platform that is not the seller. Why the platform never sells

Three-way match

A three-way match is the accounting control that compares the purchase order, the goods receipt and the supplier invoice before payment is released. Quantities and prices must agree across all three; a mismatch is the normal way a wrong pack size or a short delivery is caught.

Quote-first distribution

Quote-first distribution is the model in which almost every order begins as a quotation rather than a listed price added to a cart. It is the norm in technical supply because price depends on pack size, quantity, contract, freight and lot availability, so a published price would be wrong more often than right. The back office for distributors

Landed cost

Landed cost is the total cost of an item delivered to the buyer's door: unit price plus freight, duty, insurance, handling, customs clearance and any currency conversion. Comparing supplier offers on unit price alone is the most common way a cross-border quote loses money for the distributor.

Merchant of recordMoR

The merchant of record is the legal seller in a transaction — the party that takes payment, owns the tax obligation, and carries liability for the goods, warranty, returns and disputes. Bizily is never merchant of record: the distributor sells, and the platform is software the distributor uses. How the network works

Tail spend

Tail spend is the long tail of low-value, high-variety purchases that fall outside negotiated contracts, typically the majority of a company's purchase orders but a small share of its spend. It is unattractive to manage by hand, which is why it is where automation earns the most.

Spot buy

A spot buy is a one-off purchase made outside any standing contract, usually because the item is urgent, unusual or not carried by a contracted supplier. In a laboratory this is routine rather than exceptional: a method changes and a reagent nobody stocks is needed this week.

PunchoutPunchout catalog

Punchout is an integration in which a buyer's e-procurement system opens the supplier's own catalog in session, and the assembled basket is returned to the buyer's system for approval. It suits large buyers with fixed catalogs and standard cXML plumbing, and fits poorly where most lines are quoted rather than listed.

Contract catalog

A contract catalog is the agreed list of items and prices a specific buyer may order from a specific supplier for the term of an agreement. It covers the predictable core of a lab's ordering; the requests that arrive by e-mail are usually what falls outside it.

GPOGroup purchasing organisation

A GPO is an organisation that aggregates the purchasing volume of many members to negotiate prices with suppliers on their behalf, common among hospitals, universities and research institutes. Members buy on GPO terms but still transact with the distributor directly.

e-GPElectronic government procurement

e-GP is the electronic system through which public bodies advertise, receive and award purchases, used in Thailand and many other countries for government and state-university buying. Suppliers must be registered on the system to quote, which is why public-sector work is largely closed to unregistered distributors.

Incoterms

Incoterms are the standard trade terms, published by the International Chamber of Commerce, that fix where a seller's responsibility for cost and risk ends and the buyer's begins — EXW, FOB, CIF, DDP and the rest. They decide who pays freight and duty, which is why a quote without one is incomplete on an import.

MOQMinimum order quantity

MOQ is the smallest quantity a supplier will sell in a single order, set by pack size, production batch or handling cost. It is a frequent reason a quote comes back with a quantity the buyer did not ask for, and a frequent cause of a line being re-sourced elsewhere.

Lead time

Lead time is the elapsed time between an order being placed and the goods arriving with the buyer. In technical supply it varies from stock on the shelf to a manufacturing slot months out, so it is quoted per line rather than per order.

Drop ship

A drop ship is a shipment sent by the manufacturer or upstream supplier directly to the end buyer, while the distributor remains the seller on the invoice. It shortens delivery for bulky or cold-chain goods without changing who holds the customer relationship.

Authorised distributor

An authorised distributor is a distributor a manufacturer has formally appointed to sell its products in a territory, usually with warranty, service and regulatory obligations attached. The distinction matters to buyers because warranty claims and calibration traceability generally depend on it. For manufacturers

The parts of a laboratory or industrial order where the paperwork matters as much as the item.

COACertificate of analysis

A COA is the document in which a manufacturer states the measured properties of a specific production lot — purity, concentration, and the tests performed. Because it is issued per lot, a COA is only valid for the lot actually delivered, which is why a quote and a delivery must both carry the lot number.

LotBatch

A lot is a quantity of material produced in a single run and treated as uniform for quality purposes, identified by a lot or batch number. Traceability in a regulated laboratory works by lot: the COA, the expiry date and any recall all attach to it rather than to the product.

Calibration certificate

A calibration certificate records that a specific instrument, identified by serial number, was measured against a traceable reference standard on a given date, with the deviations found. It travels with the serial rather than the model, so an instrument delivered without its own certificate cannot simply borrow another's.

SDSSafety data sheet

An SDS is the standardised document describing a chemical's hazards, handling, storage, first-aid and disposal requirements, which a supplier must provide to a buyer. It is a condition of receiving many goods at all: a receiving dock can legitimately refuse a chemical whose SDS did not arrive with it.

Cold chain

The cold chain is the unbroken sequence of refrigerated or frozen handling that certain reagents, biologicals and diagnostics require from manufacture to use. A single excursion outside the specified range can void the material, so cold-chain lines carry packaging, monitoring and delivery-window requirements that ordinary freight does not.

Consumables

Consumables are the single-use or short-life items a laboratory buys repeatedly — tips, tubes, filters, gloves, reagents, media. They are the recurring, high-frequency half of technical supply, as against capital equipment, and are where quoting effort per order is hardest to justify by hand.

Capital equipment

Capital equipment is the durable instrumentation a laboratory buys occasionally and depreciates — balances, centrifuges, spectrophotometers, incubators. Orders are rare, large, and usually involve specification, installation, calibration and service terms rather than a simple price.

Pack sizeUnit of measure, UOM

Pack size is the quantity in which an item is actually sold — a box of 100, a case of 10 boxes, a 2.5 litre bottle — and the unit of measure is the unit that quantity is expressed in. Most quoting errors in consumables are pack-size errors: a request for 200 lancets and a quote for 200 boxes differ by two orders of magnitude.

MPNManufacturer part number

An MPN is the manufacturer's own identifier for a product, as distinct from a distributor's internal SKU or a buyer's catalogue code. Matching a request to the right MPN is the core identification problem in technical supply, because buyers commonly write the brand, an old code, or a description instead.

Catalog normalisation

Catalog normalisation is the work of turning supplier and manufacturer product data of varying shape into one consistent record per product, with brand, part number, pack size and specifications in agreed fields. Without it, the same item from three suppliers reads as three different products. List a catalog once

Off-catalog line

An off-catalog line is a requested item that a distributor does not carry in its own catalog and must source from a supplier before it can quote. In multi-brand technical supply this is the normal case rather than an exception, and it is the step that turns a five-minute quote into a three-day one. How sourcing works

QC labQuality control laboratory

A QC lab is the laboratory that tests materials and finished product against specification for a manufacturer, hospital, food producer or utility. Its ordering is repetitive, deadline-bound and documentation-heavy, which makes it the clearest example of the buyer this network is built for.

Terms that are new enough to be used loosely. These are the meanings we hold ourselves to.

Agentic procurement

Agentic procurement is the use of software agents that carry out multi-step procurement work — reading a request, identifying items, asking suppliers, assembling a quote — rather than only assisting a person doing it. The useful question about any such system is not whether it is agentic but what it is allowed to do without a person approving it. The pipeline end to end

AI procurement agent

An AI procurement agent is a narrow, named step in a pipeline that takes a defined input and produces a structured proposal, then stops — an intake agent, an extraction agent, a sourcing agent. It is not a chatbot: its output is a record for review, not a conversation.

Grounding

Grounding is the requirement that every field a model outputs be traceable to specific source text rather than produced from the model's own knowledge. In quoting it is the difference between a line that came from the customer's e-mail and a line that sounds like something the customer might have wanted.

Evidence span

An evidence span is the exact stretch of source text that a given extracted field was taken from, kept alongside the field. It makes an extraction auditable after the fact: a reviewer can see that this quantity came from those words, and a field with no span can be dropped rather than guessed.

Review gateHuman in the loop

A review gate is a required human approval between a system's proposal and any real-world effect — a message sent, a price set, a record written. It is meaningful only when it cannot be turned off for convenience: if a system can act without the gate under load, the gate is a preference rather than a control.

Abstention

Abstention is a model declining to answer when its confidence falls below a set threshold, so that the case goes to a person instead. For catalog matching it is the difference between an unmatched line a human resolves in seconds and a confidently wrong match that reaches a customer in a quote.

Rules-first matching

Rules-first matching is the practice of resolving what deterministic rules can resolve — exact part numbers, known synonyms, unit conversions — before any model is consulted, and using the model only on the remainder. It is cheaper, faster and reproducible, and it keeps the model's influence to the cases that genuinely need judgement.

Prompt injection

Prompt injection is an attack in which text inside content a system processes is crafted to be read as instructions to the model rather than as data. Procurement is unusually exposed because every request arrives from outside the company, so untrusted text must stay data: a supplier reply that says to approve itself is content to be extracted and flagged, not an instruction.

Model ledger

A model ledger is the per-call record of every request made to a model: prompt hash, model, tokens, cost, confidence and any flags raised. It is what makes an AI system auditable rather than merely trusted, and it is what lets AI usage be billed at cost with a visible margin. How the ledger works

Evals

Evals are the fixed test sets and scoring that measure whether a model-driven step still performs on cases with known correct answers. They serve the role regression tests serve in ordinary software: a release that drops below the bar does not ship, regardless of how it appears in demonstration.

Tenant isolation

Tenant isolation is the guarantee that one customer's data is inaccessible to another customer of the same system, enforced in the database rather than in application logic alone. For a network serving competing distributors it is the whole basis of participation: prices, costs and customer lists are the business. Security and data handling

llms.txt

An llms.txt file is a plain-text file at a site's root that states, for language models, what an organisation is and which pages define it. It is a convention rather than a standard, and it works the same way a good README does: one consistent account of the facts, in the place a machine looks first. Ours