Pain is Inevitable
Managing a serious RFP project is always demanding:
- Understanding your client - collating
and prioritizing requirements from stakeholders
- Understanding the industry - knowing which questions to ask vendors,
and which vendors to invite
- Interpreting vendors' proposals
Suffering is a Choice
Then there are the management challenges:
- Pulling together questions from previous projects
- Keeping stakeholders informed about the process
- Communicating with respondents - especially in regulated
environments
- Fighting with spreadsheets and emails to collate and score responses
- Demonstrating impartiality and maintaining a transparent audit trail
PostRFP orchestrates the entire RFP process, enabling you to focus your industry knowledge on vendor selection.
Single Source Of Truth
Managing an RFP with information and communication split across diverse files,
emails and hard copies is error prone, time consuming and generally no fun.
The single best thing about
PostRFP is that it keeps everything to do with your RFP in one place.
- Questionnaire - any size, nested sections/subsections, all field types
- Responses - invitations or submitted responses. Invite by picking a pre-registered company, or by email
- Attachments - Associated either with a full RFP, or linked to specific questions.
- Messages - A noticeboard tracking all communication related to the project. Both internal and vendor-facing message boards.
- Event Log - where all significant actions related to this
project are recorded. Essential in regulated environments.
- Rich, Instant Search All information, including attachment content is searchable,
grouped by project, user or vendor.
Re-use Knowledge
Many RFP projects have elements in common, so PostRFP provides a number of mechanisms for reusing this knowledge.
- Copy from previous projects
- Template libraries enable you to build up reusable questions and sections
for use across projects
- Copy/paste questions or sections within questionnaires
- Import questionnaires from Excel or from XML files
Specialist consultants can start an RFP for a new client
in no time, and then customize it to fit. New evaluation criteria are available for future projects
immediately.
But PostRFP is not just about RFPs. Rapid re-use and customization is also great for ongoing vendor assessments and due-diligence questionnaires.
Expressing RFP Requirements
PostRFP captures RFP requirements and evaluation criteria
as a web based questionnaire. You can import questions from Excel, or build them
online.
- WYSIWYG - question editing allows you to structure questions in whatever way you need
- Question Types - Choose from a number of template questions with all elements:
- Multiple Choice - radio buttons or menu
- Checkbox yes/no
- File Attachment
- Text Entry - single or multi-line. Regex validation.
- Multi-Column questions
- Compulsory Questions - Force respondents to answer key questions
- Auto-Scoring - Predefined scores for multiple choice questions
- Nested Structure - Structure questions into sections and subsections of any depth
Hierarchical RFP Weighting Tools
Accurately assigning weightings (priorities) in a
large RFP project is difficult.
Requirements are structured into questions and sections, with weightings
assigned at either level.
- Visual Representation - view the whole questionnaire as a tree structure
- Normalized Calculations - assign weightings to questions and/or sections.
PostRFP takes care of normalizing (capping) the effective weights for each section.
- Multiple Weighting Sets - different users can save their own weighting sets - so compare the view
from Accounts with the view from Sales & Marketing
- Pairwise Comparison - accurately weighing up the relative importance of evaluation factors is difficult.
We provide a pairwise comparison tool (a la AHP) to break down the process into manageable chunks.
RFP Respondent Functionality
PostRFP provides a productive environment for vendors.
The more effectively vendors can respond to your RFP, and the more information they provide, the better the resulting evaluation and selection.
- Self Service - vendors can self register on line, and then manage their own account, adding
additional users as required
- Team Working Tools - vendors can allocate, review and reject/approve questions working as a team.
- Revision Management - PostRFP saves every edit made to every question's answer. So suppliers
can view what has changed, when, and by whom.
- Answer Reuse - in many industries, the same questionnaires are reissued, either by consultants for different clients
or by Buyers performing due diligence. In such cases PostRFP enables earlier questions to be imported.
- Notes - suppliers can send messages to their colleagues or to the Buyer.
RFP Scoring and Evaluation
PostRFP's objective is to automate whatever can be automated,
and make the rest as convenient as possible:
- Tracking scoring progress - drill down progress reports make it easy to find unanswered questions
- AutoScoring - multiple choice questions can be designed to have scores associated with each choice
- Imported Answers - when a repeat response imports their last set of answers, the answers are silently
copied at the same time.
- Change Management - as usual, everything is saved, so you have a history of previous values when scores are changed
- Collaboration - scorers can add comments each time a score is updated
- Offline Scoring - generate PDFs for printing responses in side by side,
easy to score format, then load your scores into a spreadsheet before re-uploading them.
Analyzing RFP Scores
Errors in scoring calculations can be very embarrassing, if not
dangerously expensive. Percentages that don't add up to 100, anyone?
Calculating total weighted scores for a deeply nested, hierarchically structured
RFP in a spreadsheet is notoriously error prone. Spreadsheets are
two dimensional, and formulas for dealing with nested subsections are
very brittle. With multiple weighting and scoring sets the risk of
error is even greater.
PostRFP takes care of the arithmetic for you:
- Comparative scoring metrics generated on the fly, by section,
question, weighted or unweighted
- Drill down charts in-built
- Export scores in pivot table friendly format for offline spreadsheet analysis
and Finally...
- i18n -
Fully internationalised, with unicode support throughout
- Customised Look & Feel - Easy configuration for white-labelling and client branding
- Email Alerting - Keeps you aware of what team members and suppliers are doing
Get In Touch
To register for a 30 day free trial, demo or just to learn more about PostRFP:
Contact Us
Learn More
Read about PostRFP's features.
Find answers to frequently asked questions about managing RFPs with PostRFP.
See if you recoginize any familiar challenges described in these stories and interviews with our clients.
