CHAPTER 5: AGREE LONGLIST AND ISSUE RFI
After drafting your RFI, you will need to get it reviewed and agreed, then you’re ready to issue it – but you first need to decide who to! Once you’ve decided on your longlist, you may want to consider getting them to sign a non-disclosure agreement. You should also make contact with each supplier before issuing the RFI.
This chapter covers:
- reviewing and agreeing the RFI
- compiling the longlist of suppliers
- non-disclosure agreements
- managing the issue procedure, including initial contact.
Reviewing and agreeing the RFI
Once you’ve drafted your RFI, you will need to get the core team to review it and agree it. That sounds easy, but it’s important to make sure the team are really taking the time to review it properly and are not just giving it a cursory glance. If there are any errors or omissions in the RFI, it can skew the whole selection process and you may end up shortlisting the wrong options.
So, how can you make sure they’ve read it? There are a number of ways, a few of which are:
- sending it out for review and then holding a meeting with everyone a few days later to discuss and agree it
- having a short meeting with each person to gain their views directly
- sending out a short questionnaire for them to complete, including questions such as: ‘What additional information should we give the supplier about the organisation?’ Try to avoid closed questions that can simply be answered yes or no.
The first option has the advantage of being an efficient use of time and the discussions can be illuminating. You could then use the second for anyone who can’t make the meeting.
Once you’ve captured any changes, send out a final draft and ask for positive confirmations of approval. Then you can make it a ‘Version 1’, ready to send out.
Compiling the longlist
It can feel easy to get a list of possible options, but how do you know you’ve included the right ones? Well, there’s never any guarantee, but one way to minimise the risk of missing some good ones is to use a variety of methods to compile your list.
Possible ways can include:
Method |
Comments |
Current provider |
It’s usually worth including your current provider as an option; if nothing else, it gives you a baseline for comparing the others to. Don’t include them if they don’t fully cover the system/service areas you need, the relationship has broken beyond repair, or if they are going out of business! |
Recommendations from other staff |
Ask around – does anyone know of a good system or service provider to include? It’s especially useful to ask fairly new staff, as they will probably have had recent experience at another organisation. |
Recommendations from peer organisations/network groups |
If you’re lucky enough to have a good relationship with other similar organisations, you could ask them what/who they use. Networking groups are another way of gathering recommendations. |
Internet search |
This tends to be the first reaction and can bring you some very useful new options. However, we all know that searching can have mixed results! Be selective in your search criteria. Try including words that will give you the best results (e.g. if you’re searching for someone to build you a new website, try including phrases like ‘award winning’ and ‘best design’). |
Direct contact from suppliers |
You may have received some direct contacts from suppliers. It can be hard to know whether to include these – after all, you haven’t applied any of your criteria to picking them. If they come up via one of the other methods then the choice is easier, otherwise try to look at them as objectively as possible before including them. |
Table 2: Ways to compile a longlist
The next question is ‘how many should I have on my longlist?’ That’s a hard one to answer as it depends on a number of factors:
- If you do not have a tight deadline, you may want a longer list so you can assess as many options as possible.
- Conversely, if you do have a tight deadline, you should keep the list much shorter.
- You may want to have a wider choice if you’re not sure exactly what you need.
- If you are looking for a specialist system or service, there may not be that many choices anyway.
Overall, a useful length to aim for is around eight to ten potential suppliers. It’s often the case that some will not respond, and you want to make sure you have enough that do to make a proper choice. (You can keep some reserves in mind in case too many drop out.) However, many more than that and reviewing the responses will take a long time!
A reasonable estimate is for someone to read, assess and write up feedback on around one response an hour (if uninterrupted). So, if you’ve got a six-person team assessing seven responses, that’s potentially six man-days of work! (Although Chapter 6 suggests how you could reduce that.)
However you eventually compile the list, it’s again worth getting the core team to review and agree it.
Non-disclosure agreements
Whether or not to get non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) signed at this stage depends very much on your organisation and on what it is you are selecting.
If your organisation has a standard policy that an NDA is required when providing any information to a third party, then your choice is clear. If not, you’ll probably want to consider whether any of the information you’ll provide with the RFI is sensitive (e.g. personal data that comes under data protection, company confidential information, etc.). If it is, then you may want the extra protection that comes from an NDA, rather than relying on a confidentiality clause in the RFI.
Your organisation will probably have a standard non-disclosure agreement; it’s worth checking through it to make sure it covers all the sensitive aspects of your selection.
Note that if you decide to send out an NDA at this stage, you’ll need to issue it first and get it signed by both parties before issuing the RFI. This may take some time as their legal team may request changes which will then need to be agreed by your legal team, so make sure you allow enough time for this to happen.
Managing the issue procedure
Now you have an agreed longlist of suppliers, you could, of course, simply send the RFI (or the NDA if you’re including that step) to any contact or address there.
However, it’s very useful to phone up the supplier first because:
- You can make sure you have the correct contact details for the right person (a lot of suppliers split their sales teams by industry sector, location, etc. – so you need to make sure you have the right person); this is much better than just sending it to ‘[email protected]’ because you know who to expect questions from and who to chase!
- You can make sure they are interested in receiving your RFI. You may find that once you’ve told a supplier briefly who you are and what you want that they are able to let you know that their system/service is not really suitable. That gives you an opportunity to send the RFI out to a reserve supplier instead, if you wish. The danger of not doing this is that you think you’re sending to a longlist of, say, eight suppliers only to find that three don’t respond at all, leaving fewer choices than you’d expected.
- You can warn them when it’s likely to be issued so they can plan their time to be able to develop their response.
- You can give them some general information about the RFI to whet their appetite!
Once you have your contact details list, you are ready to send out the RFI (or the NDA first if that’s needed).
When sending the RFI, it’s helpful to state the closing date in the covering e-mail to make sure it’s clear. Always ask them to acknowledge receipt and to confirm that they are interested in responding and can do so in your time-frame (so you can swap to a reserve if necessary).