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.

There are two very simple things I recommend to solve this profoundly important problem:

1. Learn in action 2. Develop a self-confidence plan

First, learn in action. Learning in action is key to success when venturing into uncharted territory.

You can’t wait to have all answers. You certainly don’t want to go out in world half-baked but you don’t need a Doctorate in marketing to create awareness for solutions that you provide or a Masters in public speaking to give a speech. This is a big problem for many people – waiting until they are sure that they have all info they could possibly have about how to do something before they’ll try it. It’s just not effective and stems from a lack of self-confidence. I feel that if you do nothing else as a personal and business building strategy, work on building up your self confidence… so you’ll be able to do everything that you say you want to do.

And second, develop a self-confidence plan. I do affirmations every day. In morning when I wake up and at night before I go to sleep. Well, actually, I only do them Monday through Friday… but that should cover you.

Read Napoleon Hill’s inspirational classic “Think and Grow Rich” for a plethora of affirmations that will help you build your self-confidence.

And in closing… don’t forget to have a mad passionate love affair with yourself. Love, embrace and believe in yourself. I know how realistic it is to become wildly successful. You can totally create an abundant, joyful and prosperous business life – if you’re willing to do work.