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November 28, 2018 | Bonfire Interactive
For busy procurement teams, benchmarking your RFP process is often the lowest item on the to-do list. With many teams facing growing project volumes and limited resources, it’s easy to see why.
When it comes to tracking your team’s performance, you don’t need spreadsheets of data to sort through. Instead, you need actionable insights that help you get your job done better and faster.
To help, we’ve pulled three key RFP benchmarks that you can start tracking against today, to improve your sourcing function tomorrow. To put these in perspectives, we’ve included relevant industry benchmarks from the State of the RFP, the most comprehensive RFP study ever conducted. Compiled from 6,600 RFP projects conducted through the Bonfire Strategic Sourcing Platform, this data gives you a unique window into how RFP spending decisions are conducted at 190 organizations across North America.
Use these as a starting point for smart, practical benchmarking that leads to better purchasing performance.
When someone in your organization comes to you with a sourcing request, are you able to accurately forecast how long the procurement process might take?
Many teams have an anecdotal knowledge of how long certain types of projects take, but have not put in place a process to regularly track and review their RFP cycle times.
Why you should track this:
Industry benchmark: According to the State of the RFP data, the average RFP process takes 56 days.
Reaching a wide community of vendors is key to the success of a project, not only from a transparency standpoint by also a project competitiveness standpoint.
With most procurement teams using some form of electronic posting and submission, most teams have greater visibility into how many vendors are viewing their opportunities and how many go on to submit.
Industry benchmark: The State of the RFP study finds that 33% of vendors who register to view project details go on to submit to the RFP opportunity.
The average project receives 4 vendor submissions.
Disqualifications are a negative outcome for both vendors and procurement professionals, but there are a variety of reasons that they might occur. These include failure to provide a piece of mandatory qualifications, not meeting necessary certifications, conflicts of interest, or other factors. Tracking your disqualification rate helps you to gain visibility into why this might be happening.
Industry benchmark: According to the State of the RFP study, 11% of vendor proposals are disqualified. This has decreased slightly from 2015, when the disqualification rate was 17%.
While far from an exhaustive list, these RFP benchmarks are an actionable place to start with tracking your own procurement performance. For more RFP process benchmarks and best practices, view the State of the RFP Benchmarking Webinar On-Demand, with insights from:
Bonfire Interactive
Bonfire tip:
Discover more insights and benchmarks on public sector RFPs.