Three Ways to De-Stress your RFP Creation Process

Creating RFPs is a team effort, requiring hours and resources companies often feel they don’t have to spare. But to source new business and maintain supplier relationships, creating RFPs is crucial to an organization’s success.

The manual approach to RFP creation is a common one among businesses — even today, with the wealth of technology at our fingertips. But someone has to do the job of creating RFPs, so we might as well make it as stress-free as possible. With a few important tweaks, your procurement team can spend less time on administrative tasks and more time generating revenue.

Here are 3 ways to de-stress your RFP creation process, so you can focus on growing your business.

1. Centralize RFP

A known pitfall with RFPs is the low win rate chances, and inconsistent creation are often the culprit. It’s no wonder when teams across departments are using spreadsheets and emails to store their questions — hunting down these information in a hurry when the deadline is looming, and rushing to get the RFP out the door in time for submission.

Fortunately, RFP management solution minimizes that risk by automatically storing RFP templates and supplier questionnaires as the RFP is completed. An employee can create a brand-new RFP or can clone any legacy RFP stock template to rapidly deploy RFP. The domain experts can simply validate the RFPs using smart templates and a questions library. This fast-tracks the RFP authoring-to-award cycle time and delivers standardized strategic sourcing experience to the procurement team

2. Collaboration

Long, expensive RFx-to-award cycles and access to information by multiple stakeholders are costly bottlenecks in the RFP process. At the moment, enterprises use emails communication and MS-Excel for documenting the RFP responses between internal stakeholders and vendor teams, eventually creating sourcing chaos.

A proper RFP management solution helps to enable suppliers to use the most popular office application — Microsoft Word for responding to RFPs. With a powerful ‘response ingesting’ feature of the RFP software, sourcing managers can see the information flowing directly and enable audit trail for all communication. There is no need to download supplier responses and uploading into the RFP tool! The automated digital workflow helps users to manage deadlines to get alerts and notifications in each milestone during the RFP process.

3. Automate RFP Evaluation

Each RFP attracts a minimum of 15–20 vendors and responses totaling 40–60 questions per RFP. In the RFP evaluation stage, internal stakeholders need to evaluate individual vendor responses and collectively compare the vendor responses.

RFP management solution helps internal stakeholders to provide quantitative scores for individual vendor responses. The solution will collate the quantitative score across stakeholders based on the weightage assigned in the questionnaire stage. The strategic sourcing product delivers a side-by-side comparison of vendor responses to provide evaluators with both panoramic and granular overview of various interested vendors. This scoring method helps organizations to achieve streamlined strategic sourcing within organizations and meet deadlines.

Next Steps

RFP management technologies have come a long way. It’s time for us to leave behind the old-fashioned approach of spreadsheets and docs, and enter a more efficient era through automated solutions.

How are you creating your RFP process as stress-free as possible? We’d love to hear your tricks and tips!