Student Information Systems (SIS) are crucial to the running of a modern university. Such systems provide a single view of a students data - billing, housing, academic performance etc. In some ways they are the analog of ERP systems for manufacturing or distribution companies.

Auckland University’s RFP project faced a number of challenges. Firstly, a Student Information System is intensively used by many university staff in different functions, with different priorities. Therefore these diverse and sometimes divergent and priorities must be coordinated in the RFP. Secondly, New Zealand’s public sector procurement guidelines are some of the most rigorous in the world. This can greatly increase the administrative burden for running an RFP project.

SupplierSelect is designed to meet precisely these challenges. Multiple evaluators can collaborate on defining requirements and on assessing vendor offerings. Strict procurements guidelines for vendor communication, process transparency, and fine grained auditing can be enforced by clicking one or two options when setting up an RFP project.

For this project Auckland University of Technology registered 34 evaluator users, and defined 430 questions, broken up into 7 sections with additional subsections. The questionnaire was begun by importing an Excel spreadsheet , and was then customised and extended online, using SupplierSelect’s RFP question editing functions. Many questions were closed (multiple choice), but with comments available, as described in a recent article about creating good RFP questions.

For the RFP evaluation, scores from different evaluators where collated using SupplierSelect’s multiple score set functionality, with many users choosing to use evaluate RFP responses offline before importing the scores back into SupplierSelect for aggregation and analysis.  4 different weighting sets were configured, each reflecting a different scoring methodology, rather than the typical approach of having different weighting sets to reflect different people’s or departments priorities.

A strong RFP should ask enough questions to permit the buyer to identify the best vendor for their requirements. How many questions this is depends on the complexity of the good or service being sourced. Many of SupplierSelect’s customers issue RFPs with over 500 questions. Answers from all vendors are scored. Each question is assigned a weighting which determines how much it contributes to the total score for each vendor.

For a typical RFP this means 8 vendors answer 500 questions. That’s 4,000 scored questions. As answers are scored by the buyer SupplierSelect calculates a total weighted scores for each vendor. You can drill down to see total scores by section, subsection and question.

However, even given this ability to drill down and the automatic calculation of weighted scores, it can still be difficult to identify the issues that most clearly differentiate the bids from the various vendors.

To assist with this, SupplierSelect has developed a new report which helps the buyer to identify these key differentiators. The report makes the following assumptions:

1. The questions given the highest weighting are the most important and contribute the most the final decision
2. Questions where the all vendors were awarded a similar score don’t help to differentiate between vendors

So the report plots all questions as points on a chart with two axes. The Y axis shows the weighting for the question. The X axis plots the Standard Deviation for scores awarded to answers to that question. This allows us to divide the scatter chart into four quadrants:

The chart allows you to identify which question is represented by each scatter point by hovering over or clicking that point. Clicking a point drills down to the specific question. Clicking on different sections in the RFP Questionnaire menu filters the search to show only questions in that section.

It’s always been possible to associate an attachment with a question in SupplierSelect. For example, a typical question is:

“2.4.2. Please download, complete, and upload the attached spreasheet ‘pricingMatrix.xls’”.

It’s also been possible to attach images which are then referred to in the question:

“3.5.2. The attached file ’specification.gif’ is a technical drawing of the solution we require. Please indicate timings and costs for the implementation of this specification”

It is now possible to embed an image inline with the question:

To embed an image in a question, add a “Attachment Element” to a question. In the field editing panel at the top of the edit page there is form upload field. Use this to pick the image file from your local computer and then upload it. You will then be prompted with options for whether to display the image inline and whether to crop its size.

When a vendor comes to answer this question, it looks like this:

• Price information, and you wish to compare prices between respondents
• Financial background information
• Technical details about the product or service being sourced

Previously SupplierSelect text boxes were entirely free from - the user could input any information. A new feature recently added is Input Validation. When applied to a text input field, this checks the data input by a respondent conforms to a given “validation mask”. The following masks are predefined:

• Postive Integer or zero - e.g “23″, “0″, “342″
• Integer - the data must be a whole number, positive or negative e.g. “89″, “-5″
• Float - a postive or negative number, optionally with decimal places eg. “34.2334″, “34″, “0.342

These masks can be set when designing a question.

There is drop down menu allowing one of the predefined masks to be chosen:

If the existing existing masks don’t fit your requirements, it is possible to design your own by choosing “User Defined” from the menu. This is an advanced topic, introduced below, but you should always feel to contact us , in which case we’ll often be able to provide the mask you need by return of email.

Advanced - User Defined Validation

For the technically inclined, it is also possible to define your own validation mask using Regular Expressions. Regular Expressions are a very powerful programming tool for matching text patterns.They are not at all simple to use in more complex cases, but it’s a good thing to ask your IT guys to help out with.

For example, if you were asking a bank to take the time they take to settle transactions, you might wish to allow answer in the form:

“3 days” or “36 hours”

In this case, you want a rule saying:

“Allow numbers (optionally decimal) followed by either ‘day’,'days’,'hour’ or ‘hours’. “.

A regular expression for this would look like:

/^\d+(\.*\d*) (day|hour)s*$/

For example, if you wished to restrict an answer to one containing “yes”, “no” or “maybe”, you would write the following regular expression:

/yes|no|maybe/i

The pipe character “|” is translated as “or”.  The forward slashes indicate the beginning and end of the expression. The trailing “i” character indicates that the search is case insensitive.

This would allow answers such as “yes, in all cases” or “no, never”. To allow only “Yes”,”No” or “maybe” answers the regular expression must define the beginning and end of the input:

/^(yes|no|maybe)$/

“^” means the match starts from the beginning of the input, “$” means the end of the input. The allowed values are in brackets to indicate “allow any one of this group”.

To make the match case insensitive you can add the “i” flag:

/yes|no|maybe/i

Problems with the RFx Process

The traditional RFx cycle involves the buyer requesting a bunch of information from vendors, and providing a deadline by which they must submit the information.This workflow is ideal for projects where the buyer will only request information from the vendor once - such as awarding a specific contract. But in many cases it will be necessary to request the same information repeatedly, e.g.

• A periodic review of vendors, such a due diligence exercise. In many sectors it is necessary to periodically request new information from the vendor for regulatory and compliance purposes.
• A procurement consultant might issue similar RFx to the same group of vendors. Much of the information in these questionnaires is essentially reference data, and does not change on a client by client basis. This information needs to be timely and validated.
• An industry body such as a trade association or a publication might wish to collate a set of data about all industry participants to help buyers to form a short list before entering into a full blow tender.

In such cases, following the traditional RFx workflow results in two problem:

1. Duplication. Much of the information requested will be the same each time the RFx is issued, duplicating work for both vendor and supplier. SupplierSelect has always had some tools to help deal with this duplication but the process still generates a signficant volume of duplicated data.
2. Timeliness. A periodic process (such as an annual review)  can only take a snapshot of a given vendor at one time.

Updateable Information

To address these issues, and based on detailed feedback from our customers, SupplierSelect has implemented a new feature - “Reference Projects” ¹. A questionnaire is created by the evaluator, and vendors are invited ² to respond as for a normal project.

From here on the workflow diverges. With a reference project, the evaluator is able to view the respondent’s as soon as they are entered. Comments can be logged against specific questions where the evaluator wishes to request clarifications or additional information from the vendor. Scores can be maintained by the evaluator (these are not visible to the Respondent). This process can continue indefinitely.

The option to create a Reference Project is presented on stage 4, “Rules”, in SupplierSelect’s new Project Wizard.

When a Vendor views their list of invitations, a Reference Project’s invitation is marked as being a status “Updateble”. Vendors can also use Reference Projects to maintain a set of of “Standard Answers” which can then be used for standard bid development.

Scoring Efficiencies

Reference Projects provide a further area of efficiencies, especially for industry niche consultants.

Specialist consultants are often engaged in many RFPs within the same set of vendors, and often using questionnaires that share a good deal of the same questions. Such case involve a great deal of duplication. The vendors receive and must answer the same questions. The consultants must re-examine and rescore what are often the same answers as they have previously analysed.

SupplierSelect has always provided a solution to this - answer importing. This is a feature that allows vendors to import their answers from a previous project with one click. Scores to answers which are unchanged since the last project are also imported. This enables both sides of the transaction to cut down on duplication a good deal.

The Problem with Answer Importing

The solution outlined above has been successful and is vendor popular with big sales teams using SupplierSelect to submit tens of thousands of answers per year. However, it has drawbacks for both evaluators and RFx respondents.

For evaluators, having scores silently copy across with imported answers can save a lot of time wasted re-analyzing the same information. But it can lead to scoring inaccuracies creeping in. One problem is that there is often a great deal of subjectivity involved in scoring, and different RFxs can reflect different strengths and weakness amongst the vendors. When scores are copied blindly between projects it can  be tempted to accept them without sufficient scrutiny. Another issue is that while a score from three years may have been based on a site visit and detailed due dligence this view may no longer be sufficiently timely. Linked to this is the problem that the evaluator has no control over where the respondent chooses to import their answers from. In a big practise there may be dozens of RFPs to choose from. It’s unlikely that the quality of analysis and scoring was equally high in all projects, thus the the robustness of the scores can become corroded.

For vendors the big problem is that they have to cope with RFPs both from within SupplierSelect and being issued through Word documents or spreadsheets. Additionally, many sales teams use 3rd party proposal management software such as PMAPS (www.proposalsoftware.com).  Vendors must then decide where to maintain their canonical set of up to date answers.

Proposal Management with Reference Projects

Both evaluators and respondents can benefit from using Reference Projects to help with answering and scoring RFxs.

With Reference Projects an evaluator working on a new RFx can tell SupplierSelect to use “Reference Project A” as the template for the new RFx. SupplierSelect will then perform a full text match against all the answers in both project. Where matches are found, answers can imported. Because the Reference Projects hold the most timely and accurate information (the validity of which having been assessed on and ongoing basis) this ensure that each new engagement is being referenced against the best possible data.

Similar benefits accrue to Respondents. By managing their “authorized” set of answers in a Reference Project, a sales team can be confident of where to find the best and most timely answers to their questions.

Forthcoming releases of SupplierSelect are going to extend this functionality for respondents:

1) Providing an MS Word plugin for transferring information between SupplierSelect and desktop applications.

2) The ability to create and manage their own Project and thus define a database of precisly the answers they want to save.

¹ “Projects”, in SupplierSelect, provide a way to group together all information related a specific evaluation exercise such as a tender or RFP.

² It is also possible to mark a Project as “Public” - this means that vendors can submit information without being explicitly invited by the evaluator.

Intercontinental Hotel Group has been using SupplierSelect since 2007 to manage RFPs across all the procurement categories that luxury hotels require. In this article, Richard Tan, Director of Procurement Asia Pacific, describes how SupplierSelect helps not only with managing with RFPs and tenders efficiently, but also with achieving the brand consistency that is central to the group’s success.

Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG) is the world’s largest Hotel group by number of rooms. It manages over 4,500 hotels and over 650,000 beds. These hotels are grouped by brand - Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express and Intercontinental itself. Interestingly, IHG does not own the majority of these hotels - rather they provide a management service. Their strategy is to define strong and compelling brands, and then to ensure that the standards for each brand are adhered by the hotels under management. Central to this strategy is a consistent purchasing policy. This affects every part of a hotel’s functioning and goes to a very fine level of detail. Bedlinen, food and beverages, bathroom products - all the things that contribute to a guest’s experience must be to the same standard. So when a customer books Crowne Plaza hotels in China, Japan and Australia on an Asia Pacific business trip, the standards encountered in each country must be the same.

To achieve this, IHG publishes detailed buying guidelines for every single product purchased by a hotel. These guidelines are for the benefit of the hotel managers, and describe the standards expected for each product.

IHG’s Procurement division is responsible for ensuring both that generic procurement best practises are followed, and that purchasing policies work to enforce brand consistency. Part of best practise means that contracts are put out to tender and are assessed in a fair and unbiased manner via RFPs.

In 2007, Richard Tan, Director of Procurement Asia Pacific, began to wonder whether procurement might not be able to do more to help the broader goals of IHG in reinforcing the groups branding strategy.

“Most purchasing in IHG is done by procurement managers in individual hotels. The role of the central procurement is in large part to support these managers and find ways to help them with their jobs. With the emergence of web based sourcing software and RFP tools, we began to see an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Firstly, we could provide the managers with an efficient web based tool for managing RFPs and tenders. Secondly, we could help to reinforce the brand standards by providing RFP templates that had those standards baked in. So in early 2007 we began searching the market for a web based RFP software product that could help us achieve this.”

IHG had clear cut requirements for the software solution they needed. To support such a large number of geographically dispersed hotels with no centralized IT function, it was essential that the software was wholly web based, with undemanding client hardware requirements. Since IHG operates globally, the software had to be internationalized, with unicode support for Chinese and Japanese characters. The dissemination (and continual update) of RFP templates was a central objective, so it was important that the solution provided for a library of reusable and re-combinable questionnaire templates. Lastly, given the large number of users in so many countries, the software had to be usable without training.

• Fully web based
• Fully internationalized
• Flexible support for template libraries
• Intuitive

“We’ve used a number of the big eProcurement systems over the years, and many of these had some support for RFx management. But generally the RFx support was a minor feature tucked away in the back of the product, and was generally geared for a price orientated manufacturing RFP. SupplierSelect looked the right solution for us from very early on. It was focused on making RFP management as efficient as possible, and had the flexibility for our unusual business model.”

Within a few weeks of contacting SupplierSelect a custom, branded portal was built for IHG, and a Chinese translation was implemented.

“SupplierSelect has been very easy to work with. Managers using it for running their own RFPs need no training, and come to value the system as great way to structure their work. We’ve now run RFPs for millions of dollars of spend across an unsually wide range of  categories - financials RFPs for pension funds, food and beverage RFPs for drinks suppliers, printing services, and even a dedicated Smoked Salmon RFP! One the benefits of the system is that we can now disseminate updates to our procurement guidelines in one click. When the standards for given brand/product combination are changed, we just update the relevant template and we know that these changes will be pushed through in the next purchase.”

http://ihg.supplierselect.com

http://www.ihgplc.com/

SupplierSelect now supports per Project configuration of the “From” field to be used by email notifications. This a new mandatory field in “Project Details”. It can be changed at any time, even after a Project is published.

The Event Marketing Institute is a trade association and research body for the Event Marketing industry. Part of its role is to educate and encourage best practise amongst industry participants. Over recent years they have become increasingly aware of dissatisfaction amongst both buy and sell side organizations with regard to the RFP process. Vendors say they receive too many inappropriate RFPs, and buyers sometimes lack experience of running a formal RFP. Last year, the Event Marketing Institute published an excellent report for its member. We are very pleased to be given permission to reproduce this report here (in two parts):

Event Market RFP Best Practices Part 1 (PDF)

Event Marketing RFP Best Practices Part 2 (PDF)

This report makes some very good general points about how to conduct an RFP for a complex service as well as more industry specific advice. It discusses the differences between an RFI and an RFP, methods of appraisal and evaluation, the roles of the procurement department, and provides some case studies of RFPs conducted by leading marketing groups. Part 2 of the report provides the results of a survey carried out by the Event Marketing Institute of its members. This details how these organizations are currently conducting their RFPs, what technology (if any) they use, what plans they have for the future, and some insights into the current state of vendor relationships.

http://news.supplierselect.com/2007/08/22/team-working-for-respondents-suppliers/

This has proved to be a very important feature for larger organisations who respond to dozens of big RFPs per year via SupplierSelect. Based on feedback from these groups we’ve now added support for email notifications and enhanced event logging.

Email Notifications

The problem about email notifications is that if you’re not careful your web application can become a very efficient spam email factory. This is especially a risk when working with individual questions and answers in an RFP. A typical RFP might have many hundreds of questions, and it’s usual to work through these questions quickly. For example a manager might work through 100 questions allocating responsibility for answering each one to a different staff member.

To cope with situations like this we’ve introduced a batch processing mode for Workflow notifications. A background operation runs once each hour, and it figures out which notifications should be sent, and to whom. This information is then bundled up into one summary email which is sent to those users who have responsibility for specific questions.

Events that currently generate notifications in Workflow mode are:

• Question allocated (e.g. responsibility for answering question 3.5 is allocated to Bob)
• Answer rejected (e.g. Alice reviews Bob’s answer to 3.5, but rejects it)

This list is limited specifically to focus on notifying users of events that prompt action.

Event Logging

Respondents can now see a list of all audited events for each question they are responding to. This makes it easier to see an audited timeline for each answer - who allocated it to who, who answered it, who edited the answer, who approved it, etc etc.

http://procureinsights.wordpress.com

This article refers to the benefits of using eTendering and eRFX software generally, and is not specifically about using SupplierSelect. It draws on some of the lessons we’ve learnt from working with government organisations in the UK, Canada and especially New Zealand.