Month: January 2020

In our annual State of the RFP report, we unearthed one scary statistic—12% of RFP projects receive only one submission. 

As a procurement professional, you know why this is a cause for concern. More competition in the procurement vendor selection process increases the likelihood that you will receive the best award value. After all, each additional vendor submission increases an RFP’s price spread—the difference between the highest and lowest priced proposals—by 3%. When there is little to no competition, procurement teams miss out on opportunities to ensure the best value, denying your organization significant cost savings. 

Before you go placing the blame on vendors, it may be time to put a mirror to your own vendor selection process. After all, as noted in the NIGP Business Council report on the topic, “a company’s quality response to the bidding process says as much about the agency issuing the RFP/IFB as it does about the supplier.” 

So why aren’t vendors bidding on your projects? We’ve got 6 reasons why vendors aren’t bidding on your RFPs…and what you can do about it.

1. Difficulty finding the right opportunities

Are you publishing your solicitations in relevant places? Newspaper advertisements or simply posting listing opportunities on your website may have worked at one point, but they’re no longer the place where vendors look for RFPs. Transitioning your RFP process to an eSourcing platform (like Bonfire) can expand your reach to more relevant vendors with online advertisement and submission, making it easier for vendors to find and submit opportunities. 

2. Time-consuming or expensive submission process

As a procurement professional, it’s important to remember that complex RFPs can consume a lot of time and resources. Vendors need to decide if the costs associated with producing a quality response are worth the effort and potential pay-off. Not to mention, when bid sites charge membership fees to see bids, submit an RFP response, or even to see details about the opportunity, vendors must also consider these costs. To make the process more manageable for vendors, audit your RFP to ensure all questions are integral to the decision-making process and make it easy and free to find RFP details.

3. Insufficient timeframe to respond

Just as it took your team a lot of time (not to mention all the intake meetings!) to get your RFP ready for bidding, vendors will need to spend a lot of time collecting documents, assembling numbers, and writing (and re-writing) their responses before they can submit their bid. Not allowing enough time for vendors to provide an adequate RFP response is a surefire way to diminish vendor competition.  

4. Unrealistic price requirements

Most procurement professionals know that weighing price too heavily in complex RFPs isn’t a good idea, because the cheapest option is not always the most valuable option. Even so, buyers may impose unrealistic price requirements. As a result, vendors may choose not to bid because they won’t be able to make a profit if they are awarded the project. Unrealistic price requirements, therefore, do more harm than good when it comes to your budget; when vendors self-select themselves out of the RFP bidding process, competition diminishes, limiting the likelihood that you will attain a quality product or service at the right price. 

5. Specifications are too broad

When RFP specifications are too broad, that lack of clarity makes it difficult for a vendor to determine your needs and submit a high-quality and relevant proposal. Not to mention, broad specifications make life more difficult for your evaluators, who are trying to make an apples-to-apples comparison to determine the best value for your organization. Convoluted answers due to a lack of understanding of the specifications required can weaken the validity of that comparison. Clear specifications make it possible for vendors to make their pricing decisions, leading to a better process for them and a better outcome for you.

6. Specifications are too specific

Okay we get it, we just said that you should ensure your RFP specifications are specific, and now we’re saying make sure they’re not too specific. Trust us, it’s not because we can’t make up our minds; finding that balance between specifications that are too broad and specifications that are too specific is integral to an effective RFP. If your questions are too rigid, they leave out any opportunity to propose other solutions or include new technologies that you may not have even considered. Your job entails purchasing a diversity of goods and services for multiple departments and teams, which means you can’t be a deep subject matter expert in every area, and that’s okay! Keep an open mind by keeping your specifications broad enough that any vendor who can meet your procurement needs has the opportunity to bid, regardless of whether or not they meet your original expectations.

Procurement is the bridge between the vendor community and a buying organization; it’s up to procurement teams to understand the obstacles that prevent vendors from bidding and eliminate those barriers. To get a better idea of how other public sector organizations are benchmarking in their vendor competition, download the 2019 State of the RFP report.

Excel has become ubiquitous in offices across the globe. It’s familiar and most people have at least basic understanding (I mean, who doesn’t have “proficiency in Excel” listed on their resume?). But, sometimes spreadsheets can leave procurement professionals feeling spread thin. When submissions are coming in for bids and RFPs, you may feel a lot of stress and pressure to ensure that these documents remain organized, error-free, and properly formatted.

When teams switch to an eSourcing tool with an online order list feature, there’s an instant time savings and removal of human error between submissions and analysis for evaluations. Bonfire’s order list tool is called Bid Tables and it has been celebrated as “Excel with super powers and no learning curve”—and we couldn’t agree more.

Build a Seamless Experience

Having a consistent format across submissions enables an easier process from start to finish. When formats and expectations are standardized from the get-go, it ensures that you’re getting the information you need to make decisions. It also ensures that the information is correct, and mitigates the potential for human error that often accompanies manually formatting spreadsheets and importing data into Excel.

When the information is clearly lined up and ready for export, it can be easily shared with all stakeholders in the project.

Accurately Handle Large Data Sets

With an order lists feature in place, it’s easier to filter and sort through large data sets. The tool can handle hundreds of lines of data, which can help you prioritize data and trust that the information you need can be accurately represented and sorted. 

You can perform deeper analyses when you can trust that the data maintains its integrity throughout the process. Bid Tables ensure the numbers provided by vendors remain accurate and don’t fall victim to human error (an estimated 88% of spreadsheets unfortunately do). When you use a Bid Table template, the numbers can be locked and the tool will show you if any changes have been made. A structured format and a clear history can often be impossible to implement when critical data is siloed in Excel documents.

Bid Tables also allow you to view, filter, and sort by aggregate costs, or other quantitative information—like nutrition values on food products, or quantities of sports equipment. With these calculations automated, you can easily see the most affordable overall costs or segment by vendor. This gives your team direct insight into the numbers that matter.

Make Faster Decisions

It’s one thing to be able to clearly see the costs in order to make a decision. But, with Bid Tables, you can apply any changes that need to be made. Changes like adding a discount or accounting for quantity can easily be applied to help you make quicker decisions. This also ensures that the data remains accurate. It’s easy to trust that the math is correct, as you don’t need to apply any manual formulas or double-check the results like you might in Excel.

Being able to trust the data and apply any modifications can help you arrive at decisions more quickly and perform richer analysis. When you can instantly apply changes to a large data sets, you eliminate the time it would take to apply manual changes. You can also toggle these adjustments and export the tables directly to quickly share with project stakeholders so that they can see the factors that influenced the decisions that were made.

If you’re not already streamlining your RFP process by making specific quantitative and qualitative requests of your vendors, you could be missing out on rich analysis and precious hours of focusing on what actually matters. Using Questionnaires can help your evaluation team cut through pages of information to quickly obtain the accurate and succinct information they need to assign an accurate score.

Implementing a structured RFP process that includes questionnaires is becoming increasingly common, and for good reason. Questionnaires are often used in projects such as ERP software evaluations, obtaining professional services, collecting construction bids, collecting references, and ensuring terms and conditions are met. Having a structured way for your vendors to respond ensures that your evaluation team can access important information quickly and easily as they complete their evaluations.

Here are just a few ways adding a formal Questionnaire and structuring your RFPs can benefit your team:

Direct Responses

Meticulously reading a PDF page-by-page and line-by-line gets the job done, but at the cost of your team’s time. Often, PDFs from external vendors contain a lot of marketing jargon that isn’t always relevant and can obscure the focus from the details you need to know to move forward with the submission.

When the submission process moves online, you can remove the need to sift through pages by asking vendors the direct questions needed to ensure you’re getting the best services for the best value. With Questionnaires, there are controls you can use to limit how much information can be submitted to ensure that only the relevant information you require is present in the proposal. The guess work is taken out of the equation – there’s a clear question for vendors to respond to and clear answers for buyers to compare.

Fast Evaluations

Having direct responses ensures that you are getting the facts you need and also speeds up the evaluation process. Both qualitative and quantitative results are promptly available and automatically tabulated once submissions close. With an eSourcing tool, you can quickly see quantitative information; such as if a service will be within your budget with immediate insight into the lowest responsible bidder for a project.

When projects require a high level of detail, written answers can be collected and compiled side-by-side for a faster evaluation process. On average, RFP projects spend 31 days in the evaluation stage; when the information is available, accessible, and concise, it helps alleviate lengthy evaluations.

No Missed Sections
Building out a Questionnaire with mandatory question-sets ensures that vendors are aware of the essential sections and no critical details are missing from the final submission.

“In 2014, nearly 30% of disqualifications occurred as a result of missing documents. This has decreased consistently and is now at 16%.”

Missing information is often one of the top reasons why vendors are disqualified. The risk for missing information is mitigated when buyer expectations are clearly outlined in the submission process and when there is an automatic reminder to alert vendors when information or supporting documents are missing. When eSourcing platforms utilize Questionnaires, buyers can feel confident that submissions aren’t missing any key information that could influence the decision making process.

These are just a few key advantages to Questionnaires. For more information about how Questionnaires can help you collect qualitative information quickly, request a demo.