7 Tips to Make Your RFPs and Bids work better with any eProcurement System

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As ProcureNow begins its 70th implementation of helping local governments deconstruct existing boilerplates and re-imagine them with intelligent automation, we see important trends and best practices emerge that we’d love to share with you. These best practices are proving to help public procurement professionals build an intuitive, high quality, and repeatable structure for their electronic solicitation that makes it easier for the team to build together while also making it easier for vendors to read, understand, and respond with high quality. When that happens, our customers receive many more consistent and compliant responses that are easier for evaluators to review and objectively compare.

So without further ado:

Tip 1. Include a one-page numbered response outline somewhere near the front of the document that clearly lists how you want vendors to respond. This is an exact guide on how their table of contents should read.

Tip 2. Receive only one kind of format: either all electronic (preferred) or all paper. Accepting multiple forms of responses creates an exponential amount of work that doesn’t justify the flexibility of multiple response formats. If your eProcurement system is intuitive, your suppliers will gladly switch from paper to electronic.

Tip 3. Scour your template for everything related to helping them understand how to respond to the bid, and merge all that into a single section called “Bidding Instructions”. Also, put it right behind the Response checklist. They will be referring to this one section over and over when figuring out what and how to upload their responses. (OH… and Tip 3.1 is to put the Scope of Work right after this section. Burying your scope of work to start on page 40 is a guaranteed way to get zero responses)

Tip 4. Be explicit about the file format. This is probably the one biggest tip that we can offer. If you want your vendor to upload files in an electronic format, tell them what format… i.e. “This shall be a 1 page PDF document”. “We require a completed response in Excel (.xls) format.” Remember, you used to spend a lot of energy explaining “10 bound copies sealed into an envelope…” All we’re suggesting is saying “electronic file” isn’t enough.

Tip 5. Create Fillable PDF forms instead of just simple PDFs. Don’t be afraid of it… it’s actually very easy with a product like Adobe Acrobat – and it’s well worth the minimal time it takes to learn how to do it. The result is that the vendor won’t be led astray when you tell them exactly what to fill out and where.

Tip 6. Place the URL to your Bid Portal on the very first page (Cover Page) and include language about how sorry they will be if they wait until the last minute to register for the first time. Even though in ProcureNow that process for registration is very easy, we’ve seen folks try to create an account for the first time and respond to a bid that’s due in 15 minutes… and they get stuck on one thing and that’s it! They missed out. A simple reminder to register first thing is the first step in supporting them through the response process.

Tip 7. We’ve seen agencies continue to place a copy of the bid on their actual website software regardless of their eProcurement choice because the system they were forcing vendors to use required a long login process in order to access the bid documents. We know why people think they want to put it behind the setup wall of 5 tabs collecting vendor information – so they can track who saw the solicitation. Now, if you are using ProcureNow, you won’t have to worry, we can track the number of views on your project for you without requiring vendors to log in.

We hope the time spent reading these 7 tips helps you get more consistent and compliant responses from your supplier community… while making it easier to repeat this process over and over again!