Effect on In-House Morale: Outsourcing anywhere will erode trust between you and your workforce. It will also be hard for you to let go of employees who have become good friends. I suggest training them to perform other functions; if not, provide them with comprehensive outplacement services.

Service Provider Reliability: Unlike factors mentioned above, this one does pose a significant risk. Occasionally an offshore service provider can completely disappear or fall silent; possible reasons are bankruptcy, mass departure of personnel or loss of confidence in completing task.

The good news is that risk can be reduced to insignificance by careful selection of service provider. Your Management Capability: Outsourcing offshore will not work if it is not carefully managed by client. Not getting this right is one of major reasons that a lesser portion of all offshore outsourcing programs fail. An expert opinion on this: "This may sound obvious, but probably biggest stumbling block to offshore outsourcing is that after all contracts have been signed, companies abdicate responsibility for projects to outsourcer...' --- Deepak Khandelwal, McKinsey, Worldwide (Minimizing each of last two risks entails a large volume of information and will be subject of future articles).

To conclude, there is manageable risk in outsourcing CAD offshore; you should go ahead and make outsourcing CAD one of your objectives. But don't do anything until you have carefully planned how to handle last two risk factors, for which I will provide comprehensive information... SOON!

You can freely reprint this article provided that you do not edit it and include following resource box: _______________________________________ Lakshman Balaraman, MS (University of Michigan), B Tech (IIT), runs an architectural and engineering design firm, The Magnum Group, India, that provides CAD drafting services to global marketplace. You can freely reprint his articles in your website, ezine, or ebook. ______________________________________

Response Templates

It is also a good idea to prepare templates for bidders to complete and furnish their responses with. This will place all bidders on equal footing during evaluation process. Furthermore, predefined response formats makes evaluation a lot easier than when each bidder prepares a tender according to their own formats. Ensure that your RFP is kept confidential during and after preparation. The heart and soul of tendering process is its competitive nature. Furthermore, it is preferred not to involve personnel that has personal relationships to any of your prospective bidders.

Longlists and Shortlists

The purpose of this exercise is to determine a shortlist of bidders that will receive your RFP once it is published. The objectives are simple: Define a longlist of possible bidders and eliminate ones unsuitable to your needs until you have a shortlist.

Define Longlist

Research suppliers of product / service that your RFP defines. This may be done through networking, prior business contacts, directories, and internet.

Define Shortlist

Define a set of mission critical requirements that solution absolutely must support. Eliminate bidders from longlist. Typically this is done by comparing elimination criteria to their product or service. If even one of elimination criteria is not met, then eliminate that vendor.

Request For Information

You have option to make use of a Request For Information. This document defines nature of your request and informs potential bidders that they are being considered for evaluation process. Request bidders to indicate their compliance status to your elimination criteria. The RFI must make clear that it is only that – a request for information and not an invitation.

Invitation To Bid

Send a general correspondence to all potential bidders on your shortlist. The purpose of correspondence is twofold – First, you are inviting bidders to indicate their willingness to participate in tendering process. Bidders must respond via formal communication indicating their willingness to submit a tender. Second, bidders are informed of time and place of RFP pickup. It is normal to request bidders to sign a confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement as a part of this correspondence. This agreement must be submitted at RFP pickup. Furthermore, this agreement should contain necessary clauses to ensure return of your RFP copy should bidder decide not to participate at a later date.

RFP Distribution

Based on responses to Invitation to Bid, define a distribution list or document. Each bidder must sign, and your company representative must countersign this document when bidders are collecting RFP. This will protect your company in cases where bidder claims not to have received RFP. Furthermore, bidder must also submit confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement send with Invitation To Bid.

RFI’s & Bidder Bulletins

It is commonplace that bidders will have questions regarding your RFP after their review. Ensure that your RFP defines procedure for bidders sending RFI’s to your company, deadline date (s) for all RFI’s, as well as a common Bidders Bulletin date for responding to all RFI’s. The purpose is to collect all information requests, address them, and distribute results to all bidders at once. Ensure that bidder anonymity is maintained during a bidders bulleting.

Tender Submission

Bidders must submit their tenders in accordance to rules lain out in your RFP, unless otherwise indicated in a Bidders Bulleting. It is prudent not to accept late tenders, as this may cause discontent under bidders or factions in your organisation. It is also prudent to have bidders submit tenders in sealed envelopes, with a different envelope for Functional & Technical Bid and Financial Bid. Do not open envelopes until start of evaluation process.

Evaluation & Selection

It is preferred to follow a structured methodology during evaluation and selection process. The purpose is to evaluate all tenders in an unbiased manner. Establish this methodology prior to writing your RFP. Your RFP structure and response templates must also be built in such a way as to facilitate an easy evaluation. Another important factor to consider is to obtain a buy-in and sign-off on Evaluation Methodology prior to writing RFP from all stakeholders. This may very well avoid future unpleasantness should someone disagree with selection following evaluation and selection process.

Tender Evaluation

Evaluate financial and technical bids separately. In order to maintain impartiality, evaluate technical and functional tenders first, before opening financial tenders. It is prudent to have subject matter experts evaluate functional and technical tenders. The process of evaluation takes place immediately after proposal submission deadline. The first round of evaluation is an elimination round. All tenders will be benchmarked against criteria defined by your company during writing of your RFP. The result of elimination round is a shortlist of vendors. The evaluation and recommendation process must consider various factors, for example:

-Functional & Technical Fit of Proposed Solution

-Bidder Business Profile

-Bidder Credentials -Etcetera

No single factor must influence evaluation process - defined methodology must be based on robust objective grounds and must provide an equal opportunity to all participating bidders. Develop a report on evaluation and recommendation of bidder shortlist / selected vendor. This report must be signed off by all stakeholders (in your company) of tendering process. The content of this report is confidential and must not be divulged to parties or bidders other than stakeholders in tendering process. Also, notify those vendors that were not selected of their elimination and proceed with your selection. Should it be required, you may employ further techniques in evaluating tenders. An example includes scripted presentations of your short listed bidders. In order to obtain buy-in within your company, include general personnel dealing with issue at hand on a daily basis within your evaluation team during scripted presentations. Ensure that each evaluator prepares a scoring for each bidder following presentation. Scores are defined on scripts prepared for this presentation. It is also prudent to assign a person that will chair presentation and keep to schedule.

Riaan Pieterse is the CEO and founder of Kerberos Internet Services CC, South Africa. Having spent a number of years conducting various consulting assignments in the Far East, Middle East, Africa and Europe to businesses and governments alike, Riaan has a solid understanding of the business and technology issues in today's market.