Tag: Procurement Compliance

Experts predict that most of the jobs that today’s students will hold do not even exist yet. K-12 schools have an imperative to evolve curricula and teaching methods to ensure students are equipped with the technological skills, problem-solving abilities, and creativity they need to take on whatever the future brings.

Procurement teams see the evidence of this in the purchase requests that come across their desks. As STEM education becomes more widespread, procurement teams are playing a key role in delivering the right technology to classrooms.

From SmartBoards to 3D printers, technology purchases now make up 25% of all RFPs run by K-12 procurement teams.

IT procurement decisions are more complex and involve more stakeholders than procurement projects for well-understood products and services. As a result, procurement teams have to work closely with educators and administrators to determine what classrooms need and how to get it at the best price, according to applicable rules and regulations.

It’s no small challenge! Here are three key considerations to help you work with stakeholders to facilitate successful IT procurement outcomes:

#1 Consistency

For stakeholders who don’t live and breathe procurement, the RFP process can seem daunting, cumbersome, and out-of-step with the fast pace of technology change. As one school district superintendent put it, “The traditional procurement process is time-intensive, bottlenecking the ability to stay current with the latest technologies and curricular offering.”

Standardizing the RFP policy and process provides everyone with a clear roadmap, which helps to ensure smooth and efficient stakeholder participation.

This has been a key part of Green Bay Area Public Schools’ success in changing the perception of the technology RFP process. In addition to referencing state and local policy to ensure standardization of when and what type of RFP procedure must be used, they have also built out a standard timeline and leverage a common template to build their RFPs.

“Systematizing and building guidelines and procedures into the school district’s culture can help make each procurement a little smoother and less daunting than the one before,” writes Green Bay Area PS’ Chief Technology and Information Officer Diane Doersch. 

Learn more about how Green Bay Area Public Schools ensures effective collaboration in their RFPs in the upcoming webinar “Better Collaboration for Better Classroom Outcomes” with guest Jake Alverson, Director of Procurement, Green Bay Area Public Schools.

#2 Collaboration

In order to achieve the desired educational outcomes of technology purchases, procurement teams, district administrators, and classroom educators need to get on the same page.

It’s easier said than done when busy schedules, geographic distance, and different priorities get in the way.

Procurement teams can lay the groundwork by reaching out to stakeholders at regular intervals to understand their upcoming needs and open up communication channels early in the process.

Another foundation of effective collaboration is providing an easy and convenient way for stakeholders to access project details, communicate, and complete their evaluation. Historically, participation in the RFP process has meant a lot of paperwork for evaluators, with a host of binders, spreadsheets, and emails to manage on top of their day-to-day work. However, eProcurement technology has made it much easier for teams to share information and collaborate virtually, saving time and making it possible to ensure alignment despite geographic distance and busy schedules.

#3 Compliance

Procurement teams are relied upon to guide stakeholders through a maze of federal, state, and local procurement laws, as well as school district policy. As if this weren’t enough, IT procurement often comes with additional compliance concerns surrounding cybersecurity and the privacy of student data.

Procurement teams can leverage resources such as their legal team, internal IT resources, or helpful tools like this edtech evaluation database to help navigate these policies and procedures. From there, it is valuable to operationalize compliance—for example, by creating templates that ensure all clauses are included or using an automated system to manage vendor submissions and collect Conflict of Interest forms. These steps help to ensure that transparency and fairness is built into the DNA of your procurement process.

Best value procurement, a competitive process that prioritizes best overall value rather than simply the lowest price, is on the rise in the public sector.

In fact, a study of over 6,600 RFP projects found that the lowest priced proposal won in only 10% of all projects. Conversely, the most expensive proposal won 2.9% of time. The majority of projects fell in the middle, finding a balance between price and technical or qualitative factors in order to determine the best overall value (rather than simply the lowest cost).

Healthcare decisions are particularly well-suited to the best value procurement model because they must always consider patient outcomes above the bottom line. Many RFPs include factors such as service quality, experience, or clinician preference in the evaluation.

Especially when it comes to procuring cutting-edge technology or innovative solutions, procurement teams are beginning to replace the traditional RFP (which provides a list of predetermined specifications) with a problem-focused approach, which presents the challenge to be solved and gives vendors flexibility to propose solutions. 

The challenges of evaluating best value through paper and Excel

Best value procurement and other innovative methods deliver better solutions at a better price, which is good news for healthcare organizations and the patients they serve.

However it only makes procurement’s job harder. They must involve more stakeholders and ensure well-balanced and clearly specified criteria, while controlling costs and maintaining compliance to rules and regulations — and for many teams, they are doing it all over email, Excel, and paper.

While digitization is well underway in frontline healthcare, it has lagged when it comes to the administrative functions of the organization, leaving much of the RFP process to be conducted offline. This results in high administrative demands on procurement teams, as well as a risk of errors or delays in the process. The sheer amount of time it takes to conduct manual data entry and manage evaluators by email means that many teams have limited capacity to take on strategic procurement projects.

Three ways eProcurement software helps teams conduct best value procurement

Bringing the bid and RFP evaluation process online eliminates mountains of paperwork from buyers’ desks, cutting the amount of time spent on manual projects by half.

Leading eProcurement platforms go beyond efficiency gains to provide workflows and tools that make it easier to manage best value evaluations of RFPs. Here’s how:

1. Easy stakeholder engagement.

RFP decisions often depend on the input of several individuals across the organization, including clinicians, facilities managers, administrators, and others.

eProcurement platforms provide one online location to engage evaluators and centralize communication.

For evaluators, it means that they can log into one platform to find, review, and score relevant proposal documents at their convenience.

For bid administrators, it means that their inboxes are free from lengthy email chains, and their to-do lists are free of manual tasks like scorecard creation, distribution, and tabulation. With clear visibility into evaluators’ scoring progress and automatic score tabulation, bid administrators can focus on facilitating best value decisions, rather than managing administrative tasks.

2. Evaluation tools for efficient review of vendor information.

Bid administrators’ time is best spent on the difficult task of understanding stakeholder needs and properly balancing scoring rubrics — not on manually copy-and-pasting scores or checking vendor submissions for completeness.

eProcurement software platforms allow procurement teams to set custom weighted criteria, collect structured vendor responses, and automatically collect and tabulate scores, saving administrative labour at each step.

Evaluation tools automatically format large amounts of information, attributes, and specifications side-by-side for ease of comparison and scoring, so decisions are made with all the necessary information at hand.

3. Robust support for compliance requirements.

In a 2016 survey across Council of Academic Hospitals of Ontario (CAHO) members, 76 percent of respondents reported policies, directives, and procurement regulations as “major hurdles” to adopting innovation within their companies.

eProcurement platforms can’t change the laws that procurement teams must adhere to, but they can support procurement teams’ efforts by providing customizable built-in controls throughout the process. For example, online Conflict of Interest form collection makes it easy to ensure evaluators’ impartiality before they are granted access to proposal documents. eProcurement platforms also provide centralized digital records of every step in the decision to protect the organization from legal challenge and make it easy to respond to vendor debriefs.

Procurement teams have an unprecedented opportunity to provide value to their organizations through leading practices such as best value procurement. Healthcare-focused eProcurement software makes it easier to manage the evaluation of healthcare bids and RFPs.  

Procurement professionals know that when it comes to RFP pricing, the lowest price isn’t everything. Nevertheless, the myth of price as a silver bullet persists.

Unlike their price-only counterparts like Requests for Quote or simple bids, RFP decisions balance technical requirements with pricing considerations to arrive at the best value proposal. However, procurement professionals still hear objections from stakeholders who dismiss the RFP as a bureaucratic vehicle for driving down prices, or vendors who seek to avoid them entirely.

To determine the truth of this oft-debated point, we turned to the data from over $4.4 billion in RFP decisions managed through the Bonfire eProcurement Platform. The State of the RFP Benchmarking Report provides a definitive — and surprising — answer.

The truth about RFP pricing

Across over 6,600 RFP decisions, the least expensive proposal won in only 10% of all projects. Conversely, the most expensive proposal won 2.9% of time.

This finding shows that while price is important, it is rarely the be-all-and-end-all that it is often assumed to be. Furthermore, the vast majority of the time, the winning proposal is neither the highest nor the lowest priced. Besides putting to rest an old myth, this finding carries important implications for procurement teams.

Clear specifications help vendors price RFPs right

Unstructured or unclear RFPs make it difficult for vendors to put forth their best proposal, and also for buyers to make apples-to-apples comparison to determine the best value for their organization.

The research shows that most RFP decisions are not hinging on price alone, but rather a nuanced combination of technical and pricing considerations. As a result, it is imperative for vendors to have enough information to develop their proposal and pricing accurately. The more assumptions that your vendors have to make in order to answer your RFP, the greater the risk that they will:

• Submit low-priced minimal bids that will need to be upgraded later at additional cost;
• Submit high-priced bids to cover their risk;
• Choose not to bid because it’s not clear whether they will be able to make profit.

Very clear specifications make it possible for vendors to make their pricing decisions with a higher degree of accuracy, leading to a better process for them and a better outcome for you.

Defensible RFP decisions are key

Another important takeaway is the imperative for teams to ensure their RFP decisions are well-justified. In today’s climate, procurement is under great scrutiny to follow a fair process and provide value. With the majority of bids not being awarded to the lowest price, it is important for teams to be able to justify this decision.

Procurement teams must be able to demonstrate that they have performed a detailed review of each proposal’s strengths in context of their respective prices and found the higher priced offer to provide better value. A thorough RFP evaluation process is key to ensure that you have confidence in the scores and selection. Meanwhile, thorough documentation ensures that you can adequately justify the decision after the fact, in the event of vendor debriefs, bid protests, or internal audits.

More RFP questions, answered

RFPs provide structure to manage complexity and ensure a level playing field in some of the world’s most important spending decisions. However, they are often conducted behind closed doors. The State of the RFP uncovers industry benchmarks for RFP set-up, RFP pricing, evaluation, and outcomes, dispel common myths and shed light on the best practices of leading procurement teams.
For more answers to your RFP questions, view the State of the RFP Benchmarking webinar-on-demand.