Automate your RFP Process and Find the Right Vendor

Smart features to enable your RFP system create, deploy, and manage effective RFPs

Feature Rich to Eliminate Your RFP Process Headaches

Creating an
Effective RFP System

  • Insufficient resources
  • Managing domain experts and departments
  • Getting all stakeholders on board
  • Dealing with complicated security, compliance, and technical issues
  • Missing deadlines

Getting More Vendors to Participate

  • More participants = Greater competition
  • Vendor fatigue
  • Too many places to post your RFP

Evaluating the Responses to the RFP

  • Validating vendor selection — how do you know you’ve chosen the right one?
  • Not all questions are of equal importance — how do you measure them?
  • How do you score long, complicated essay-like answers?

The time involved to create and evaluate RFPs often outweighs any benefits of cost savings gained.

What If You Could Automate the Whole RFP Process?

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DirectRFP® is the first RFP software platform to solicit exact and measurable responses through an automated process.

It cuts the time you spend managing the RFP process by 60% and the costs by 50%.

DirectRFP® lets you:

  • View all RFP projects via a web-based, single-pane window
  • Leverage legacy RFPs by importing .docx and .csv files
  • Clone previous RFPs for fast set-up
  • Store questions in a custom library for use across multiple RFPs
  • Store vendor information
  • Collaborate within the app and track all activity

How DirectRFP® Works

Single-Pane Web Interface

Benefit: See all RFPs (open, pending, active) and associated activities in one place

Assign and Manage Roles and Access

Benefit: Immediate transparency

Manage Emails, Action Items, and Calendar by Project

Benefit: With just a glance, know what needs to be done and by when

Deploy and Review RFPs in 7 Simple Steps

Benefit: In one place, explain the RFP, assign users, upload files and questions, put in your benchmark price (which bidders do NOT see), invite vendors, review and launch the RFP

Maintain a Complete Audit Trail

Benefit: Each action, whether by the buyers, the vendors, or contributors, is tracked and time- and date-stamped. Makes everything transparent and audit-able.

Assign Internal Users and Add Permissions

Benefit: RFPs are a collaborative effort, but not everyone needs access to everything. Assign users and limit what parts of the RFP they can interact with—a big benefit in maintaining an audit trail.

Upload Files and Manage Access and Actions

Benefit: Put all associated RFP files in one place; have the ability to require vendors to read or leave as optional. No need to go searching through a file cabinet or other storage device.

Create Multiple-Choice Questions, Add Weighting, and Scoring

Benefit: Takes the guesswork out of which questions are more important; streamlining the RFP review and selection process.

Side-by-Side Comparison of RFP Bidders

Benefit: Automatic scoring takes bias out of awarding bids to ensure you choose the best. It gives you an apples-to-apples comparison.

Add Human Intervention When Needed

Benefit: No automated tool takes the place of human judgement. Review RFP bidders’ answers and change scores based on answers to questions. For instance, in the screenshot below, Question 1’s “Yes” included a comment that it could service 99 out of our 100 locations. So the real answer is probably maybe, and you can turn it to yellow and change the score.

Use Pricing Templates

Benefit: If you leave the pricing up to the vendors to submit in whatever form that they choose, you’re trying to also compare apples and oranges. So, we’ve standardized pricing templates based on the products and services, so when you get the pricing back from the vendors it’s uniform and very easy to compare side by side.

Add Vendors, Store their Information, and their Answers

Benefit: Some vendors bid on more than one RFP. Saving their answers and making them available to them saves them time.

Clone Legacy RFPs

Benefit: Saves time; no need to reinvent the wheel.

RFP Communication, Audit, and Review Benefits

RFP Communication Benefits

  • Improved ease of RFP vendor access attracting higher quality bids;
  • Departments can work collaboratively for drafting and scoring;
  • Compartmentalized access for various departments/stakeholders;
  • Retains RFP vendors’ answers to allow bidders to respond faster and more easily

RFP Audit Benefits

  • The digital footprint ensures a complete audit trail for compliance and transparency;
  • All information and data is held within one system;
  • Communication between Buyer and Vendor stays within DirectRFP®
  • Analysis/data automatically generated

RFP Review Benefits

  • Bidders complete the RFP within the platform for uniform responses and easy comparison;
  • DirectRFP® cuts 60% of the time taken to manage your RFP process;
  • Teams can manage several RFP’s for different departments;
  • Quicker turnaround time to select vendor;
  • Store vendor responses

And there’s more…!

Use Your Time Wisely

Selecting from a library of past questions, and cloning or importing past RFPs means that DirectRFP® will automate 90% of your RFP; allowing you to spend more time on the critical information unique to your project.

Give us a call at 916-757-1100 for a personalized demo.