Learn more with a better RFP
Now that I have my own consulting practice I thought I’d opine on how companies can get the most from their RFPs. I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who worked for a large credit services vendor and has seen and answered (literally) hundreds of RFPs centered around credit decisioning. I’ll keep this brief.
1. Have a single person or small team responsible for editing the RFP/RFI. Don’t just gather input from everybody and append the document. The document needs to be internally consistent; ask a confused question and you’ll get a confused answer. Also, I wouldn’t put procurement solely in charge of this process (unless they are really hands on). More than likely they won’t know the specific business requirements well enough to know if the RFP is internally consistent.
2. Be clear on what you are asking. Vendors have different products that do different things. Some are batch and some are real time. Credit card account management can happen both proactive and reactive (not to mention authorizations and all the other stuff). A client might ask if the vendor supports screens. Which screens? Public facing application entry screens? Manual review screens? Rule engine config screens? Give the vendor enough context to know what you mean.
3. I would ask fewer larger open ended questions and not lots of little detailed questions (there is a balance of course). You might ask about a specific way of doing something (for example segmenting variables) but it might not be the only way to do it. Technology is changing fast and you don’t want to hook onto old ways of doing things when there are better modern methods. The goal of the RFP is to learn about the vendor’s capabilities and see if they match your requirements. Give them some freedom of movement to do that while answering your must have questions. Resist the urge to “pre-design” the vendor’s system.
4. Keep in mind the goal of the RFP, to winnow out non competitive bids to get to finalists. If every bidder is a finalist then the RFP process can slow things down rather than speed things up. An RFP inspired live session could be a quicker way to gather the necessary information.
5. Generally I’d make some live demo/discussion part of the RFP submission. When it comes to technology there is so much nuance in answers regarding computing. Short comments or worse yet only Yes or No type responses can leave a lot of detail out of the picture. What you think you are getting and what you are actually getting could be very different. It’s hard to appreciate those details lacking a live give and take with the vendor.
Remember during this process you'll likely learn a lot not just about vendor capabilities but also about your own system requirements. As you learn it may change what you want. If you need help with your RFPs feel free to reach out to peter.j.accorti@gmail.com.
