Looking for Responsive RFP software pricing?
In the last few years, RFP issuers have embraced technology to improve their procurement processes. However, until recently, they have struggled to easily compare RFP pricing. To solve this challenge and enable true digital transformation for strategic sourcing teams, Responsive developed vendor pricing tables.
This article explores the roadblocks to digital transformation and explains how RFP technology is evolving to help.
The challenge of achieving true digital transformation
As more and more organizations embrace digital transformation, it’s important to continually ask the question, “Why are we doing this?”
Hopefully the answer is that tedious, manual work tasks are turning into simpler, digital ones. Ideally, they become workflows that truly save time, eliminate hassles, speed processes, mitigate risk and so on.
The request for proposal process is no different. Technology is playing a bigger role on both sides — issuing RFPs and responding to them. Yet in many cases, instead of digital transformation, organizations are experiencing “digital transfer-mation” where the introduction of technologies merely shifts frustrations, adding as many obstacles to the process as it removes.
Strategic sourcing is a perfect use case, where the process of finding and evaluating vendors often involves a lot of moving IT parts to issue an RFP, from managing Word documents and sharing files to mining CRM data and sending emails. When complex RFP pricing or calculations are required, Excel spreadsheets likely play a central role.
While this tangled web certainly is digital, it’s not transformative. And organizations are looking for alternatives.
How RFP software delivers
That’s where a dedicated RFP software solution like RFP360 enters the picture. Instead of having to piece together an unstructured, unmanageable chain of events and technologies, customers can quickly streamline the process from start to finish in one platform.
RFP software vendors are dedicated to understanding customer pain points. And then using that knowledge to provide features that actually solve those RFP-related problems — helping to drive real innovation, and yes, transformation. A recent example is the new vendor pricing table feature from RFP360.
Working hand in hand with customers on requirements, RFP360 built an enhancement that empowers you to collect, analyze and present RFP pricing information from vendors in a format that delivers a straightforward, “apples-to-apples” comparison.
The benefit of proposal pricing tables
You can easily add a pricing table with formulas and unit-of-measure lists to any RFP you create. Or, add a pricing table to an RFP you already have in your library. Then when you issue the RFP, which is a completely digital experience, vendors simply fill in the table. Then RFP360 automatically calculates the proposal pricing values. The results are then presented in a comparable format, regardless of the unit of measure they select.
It simplifies the RFP pricing comparison process for vendors and saves issuers a considerable amount of time and energy by removing Excel spreadsheets from the equation, as Benefit Technology Resources recently discovered.
“The new RFP360 pricing feature gives vendors the opportunity to present pricing in a way that mirrors their pricing proposals,” said Ashley Kirasich, a continuous improvement manager at Benefit Technology Resources. “It reduces laborious clarification communications for our team and the need to manually build extensive formulas into Excel when producing a pricing analysis for clients.”
Digital transformation may seem like a big, overwhelming and complicated undertaking. However, it’s really a series of more targeted, smart and practical improvements like Benefit Technology Resources is implementing. And the process should ideally start with finding one technology that can help you get the smaller yet time-consuming things done in less time with fewer steps. Only then will the benefits of digital transformation begin to add up.
To explore more ways that RFP technology transforms e-procurement by making RFP automation and vendor scoring easier, visit RFP360’s vendor evaluation solution.
