RFP Manager Software Documentation
RFP Manager Sample Documention
Request For Proposal Evaluation Criteria Manager
Managing
1. Evaluation Criteria
2. Request For Proposal Issues
3. Vendor Answers to the Request For Proposal
4. Questions to the Vendor
5. Scoring of Vendor Proposals to the RFP
6. Determining The Vendors that Meet or Exceed Your Criteria
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
The IT Acquisition Process 1
Steps in the IT Acquisition Process (The MAP(tm)) 2
Form the Team 2
Establish the Decision Criteria 2
Determine the Relationship with the Vendor 3
Gain Management Approval 3
Develop the Contract 3
Issue the RFP 3
Conduct the Bidders Conference 4
Evaluate Potential Suppliers 4
Implement the Zone of Consideration 4
Administer the Contract 4
Why would we want to do this instead of meeting and discussing the issue 5
The Basics of the Evaluation Criteria Manager Application 6
How does it work? 6
The Project Requirements and Specifications (The Issues) 8
The Evaluation Criteria 11
Importing the Requirements and Specifications - The Issues 13
Format The Issues So They Can Be Read Into The System 13
The Switchboard 15
Required Steps to set up a project 16
The Add Employee Screen 16
The Rating Team and the Scoring Team 17
The Project Entry Screen 18
Set up Task Information (Evaluation Criteria Summary Topics) 21
Import Business Issues (RFP requirements, Contract Issues, etc) 22
Importing the Issues 22
Assign Major/Minor Tasks to Issues/Requirements Set business Issue Imp. 25
Assigning Categories to the Business Issues 25
Set Business Issue Importance 27
Set Project Evaluation Criteria (Define Percentages Etc,) 28
Generate Project Major/Minor List for Evaluation Criteria Report 30
Changing the Evaluation Criteria Percentages 31
Enter Vendor Information 32
Import Vendor Proposal 34
Reading the Vendor Proposal into the Evaluation Criteria Manager 34
Proposal Scoring - Enter Scores and Notes 36
Reports 37
File Structure and Setup 38
The Main Access Application File 39
The Company Database Tables 41
The Project Database Tables 42
Linking the Company and Project Database Modules to the Main Application 43
A Test Project 46
The RFP Process - A Step By Step Checklist 50
REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL PROCEDURES 50
Introduction 50
TYPES OF PROCUREMENT 51
Determine Criteria 51
Guidelines 51
The Basics of the Evaluation Criteria Manager Application
The Evaluation Criteria Manager software was built on the foundation that:
- The issues written in an RFP are the complete set of requirements, specifications, and contractual obligations that, the company has determined, are the minimum standards acceptable for a contract to be awarded;
- The issues will be rated and weighted for importance;
- The issues form the criteria for evaluating a vendor’s proposal;
- The vendor’s proposal is scored on how the responses meet the issues (requirements and specifications)
- The scores will be multiplied by the issues’ weight and added to a final score that will determine the quality of the proposal as it relates to the issues in the RFP;
Once scores have been determined a simple method for determining the proposal to select is to divide the vendor’s project cost by the vendor’s final score giving a dollars per point. This price/performance ratio will show the best value proposal.
Some companies will attempt to balance the costs and set a point value to the cost, then adding the resulting points to the vendor’s final score. This method causes the vendors to be rated based on another vendors cost submission and does not really evaluate a vendor based on only what they submitted and how that submission meets the needs of the company.
The price performance ratio, however, aligns the vendors based on the quality of the proposal and that proposal’s costs for implementation. It allows each proposal to be graded on its own merits and eliminates the result from being tarnished by another vendor’s submission.
How does it work?
The software requires the issues to be read into the database, evaluated by the company for importance and then summarized into a report showing the weighted relative importance of the issues. Comments by individuals rating the issues can be input into the database and a report of the comments can be printed.
The software then provides for the input of vendor proposal information cross-matched to each business issue in the RFP that was read into the database.
Vendor response can be scored and comments input by each member of the evaluation team. Specific questions to the vendor can also be included and a report, in letter form, can be printed with the specific questions as they apply to the particular RFP issue.
Once scoring is completed the software then produces a report showing the vendors final weighted total score based on a raw averaged team score for each issue and the weight applied to each issue.
The main advantage of the software is to allow individual team members, either those rating issues or scoring proposals, to rate and score as time permits rather than eating up meeting time. Also since the rating and scoring is performed individually and independently from group dynamics as well as being rated as scored on the computer the software captures the comments and questions on the fly rather that relying on handwritten notes that may become lost or unreadable.
The Project Requirements and Specifications (The Issues)
The Project Requirements and Specifications (The Issues)
RFP issues written in an RFP are the complete set of requirements, specifications, and contractual obligations that, the company has determined, are the minimum standards acceptable for a contract to be awarded.
There may be well up to or over a thousand individual issues that need to be tracked.
Issues such as:
System-Wide Requirements.
1.1. Following are mandatory requirements:
1.1.1. All parts of the system must be integrated with a minimum of data redundancy.
1.1.2. The system must have a facility for recording all transactions, and the status of each transaction, to facilitate recovery in the event of disaster.
1.1.3. The system must be capable of performing mass file maintenance based on changes in profit margins, shipping charges, cost of durable goods or any other field which has a standard value
1.1.4. The system must provide for purging of data from the system with a full accounting.
1.1.5. Documentation and operating procedures (technical and user) must be supplied.
1.1.6. The security and access to the system and its data must be assured.
1.1.7. Authorization levels (e.g., read, add, change, delete by application, file, record, field) must be assigned by a designated security officer.
1.1.8. Security audit trail reports must be provided to both identify authorized individuals accessing and entering and/or changing data in the system, and to list the transactions.
1.1.9. Vendor personnel must have expertise in the Customer business.
1.1.10. Vendor must provide the hardware, or additional hardware, required to run the system at the Customers site.
Generate Evaluation Criteria
The Software will generate the Evaluation criteria based on the team assigning importance rating (simply 1-10) to each issue.
The issues form the basis of an evaluation criteria
A typical Evaluation Criteria may look like the following:
I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY TOTAL: 500
A. Completeness.................................................. 100
B. Understanding of Current Operations............. 200
C. Understanding of Requirements..................... 200
II. PRESENTATION OF RESPONSE TOTAL: 1,000
A. Completeness.................................................. 200
B. Clarity of presentation..................................... 200
C. Organization of presentation........................... 200
D. Understanding of DOL objectives.................. 200
E. Qualified acceptance of terms and conditions 200
III. EXPERIENCE TOTAL: 3,500
A. Client reference............................................. 1000
ETC ETC