Part Three of Four

In part one and two of this series we covered the importance of providing a clear, concise and detailed proposal. In part three, we will touch on the remaining components, the presentation and on responsibilities for your RFP document.

Let’s start with some good news — quite often another department like engineering or your technical group is responsible for providing the scope or the technical component of the RFP. They are responsible for putting together the guts of the proposal and the reason why you are issuing the proposal in the first place. You have heard the term “garbage in, garbage out”. Well, if you put garbage in your proposal, it is likely you will receive garbage in response.

As a buyer, you are typically responsible for incorporating this scope or detailed specification somewhere into the document. You need to construct or put the proposal together in a manner that makes sense to the bidder.

Other areas you need to focus on are the table of contents, the commercial terms, conditions, dates, site visits, meetings and ultimately putting together the evaluation and recommendation from all of the bids received. It is at this point you need to be cognizant of insurance, environmental, regulatory requirements and little things like payment terms.

What are some of the practices you can do to improve presentation and more importantly simplify this task?

1. Much of a previous RFP (more…)