Software RFP Templates - RFI / RFQ

How to Find Best-Fit Solutions Faster and Cheaper With TEC’s Software Requirements List and RFP Templates

Companies take around 20 weeks to select their software, which is understandable given there are myriad products in each software category—such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), business intelligence (BI), human capital management (HCM), and customer relationship management (CRM). The Request for Proposal (RFP) document alone is used to solicit bids from qualified contractors and takes anywhere from several weeks to months to draft from scratch, depending on the amount of information you need to gather. You’d want to research the market and define your business needs, gather feedback from stakeholders, and categorize your proposal into a multi-page document or Excel file that you’ll distribute to your shortlisted vendors.

To save our clients time and boost their chances of finding that best-fit solution first-time round, TEC has invested their 30+ years of experience in enterprise software assessment and consulting as well as vendor-related projects into drafting 69 different data-driven enterprise software RFP templates.

Each product category has its own customized RFP template for industry, business size, and niche. For example:

If you’re an organization operating in the manufacturing industry and would like to explore systems for managing your manufacturing processes, TEC offers 12 popular templates for relevant technology that you may examine to see which fits your specific manufacturing requirements: such as discrete ERP RFP template, process ERP RFP template, and ERP for small manufacturing business template.

Each template contains thousands of category-specific words precisely matched to that particular software product.

For example: The ERP RFP template for discrete manufacturing would have the full software features list that you can expect to find in a discrete ERP system on the market to help you find a quality discrete manufacturing ERP system, including human resources, and manufacturing, purchasing, inventory, and sales management, among others.

Once you know which template you need, all management needs to do is the following:

• Select and download the RFP software template that matches your procurement needs
• Share that RFP template among stakeholders for the requirements-gathering process, to facilitate consensus on needs among all team members.
• Collaboratively check off the software features most important to your business needs.
• Distribute that RFP template to your shortlisted vendors.

Vendors, in turn, could use the RFP template’s checklists to help them compare their level of support against your own business requirements. 

What Is an RFP Template?

The request for proposal (RFP) is a document or Excel file that potential buyers create to explain their product or service needs to vendors. When it comes to choosing enterprise software, your particular RFP template outlines product specifics such as scope and price, the problems you want your required software to solve, and the specific functionalities you want the system to contain.


Key elements include:

• Relevant background business information
• A detailed description of your requirements and expectations
• Your target users and possibly your market and main competitors
• Your budget
• A description of your scoring methodology as well as when the vendor’s proposal is due, among other expectations
• Approximate timeline for project completion
• Questions on the history and experience level of vendor

RFP templates let you reach out to vendors quickly without drafting the RFP document from scratch each time. They also save you time on the RFP process because all the requirements and protocols are already in one place. Reduced friction in the RFP process also helps you reach a wider net of vendors, possibly resulting in more comprehensive bids. All you need to do is tweak the purchased template to suit your particular business scenario and requirements. 

Challenges with Drafting Software RFP Templates 

From our years of software selection and implementation consulting, TEC has identified three bundles of challenges with drafting successful RFP proposals. These are:

1. Project-related issues

The organization is uncertain what their problems are and which system they need to resolve their issues or move their business forward. Their requirements-gathering process is chaotic and incomplete and they’re conflicted on must-have, could-have, and won't-have software features.

1. Stakeholder-related issues

Decision makers need to receive a coherent and consistent response from sampled team members by a certain deadline before they distribute the RFP to shortlisted vendors. All stakeholders need to agree—or at least not be in conflict—on the software’s must-have features. Additionally, team choice needs to match the business budget. It helps if stakeholders have experience with product evaluation and selection, so they can filter vendor marketing hype from reality.

1. Vendor-related issues

Decision makers need to distinguish marketing rhetoric from reality. With many available products on the market, how can you tell which product is the best match for you? You’d want to know how well the product meets your needs. If it has the features and functions you require, and if it will be on the market for years to come. You’ll also want to know if the vendor’s hardware is compatible with your software, as well as their implementation failures and experience, among other items. You need thorough and coherent responses to the criteria contained within your RFP document by the given date. 
 

4 Ways That TEC RFP Templates Can Benefit Your Software Selection

Since 1993, TEC, with its exclusive focus on software selection and implementation consulting, has successfully delivered more than 600 projects to clients across more than 24 industries. As an unbiased independent consultancy, we remain impartial and don't recommend any software products to our clients. Our clients include Revlon, Lego, Ikea, Con Edison, Honda, Nissan, Acumed, Interface, ECOM Agroindustrial Corp., SMC, and Flood Protection Authority. The RFP templates reflect our agile learning experiences and are aimed to help streamline and simplify the software selection process, reduce the overall costs of software selection for your business, and significantly reduce the business risks inherent in  software selection.  

TEC’s RFP templates help you accomplish in four main ways?
 

1. Validate your business requirements faster. TEC templates are comprehensive documents containing all matched terms related to industry and business size and are divided into 57 standard modules across different software applications that include ERP, BPM, HCM, SCM, PLM, CRM, and BI. This means that you’re more likely to validate your business requirements from the software and lower or gain more comprehensive bids in half the time you otherwise would have had you drafted your RFP from scratch.
2. Quickly confirm which vendors to eliminate. TEC RFP templates are data-driven, which means you’re more likely to make the correct software choice first time-round. Each RFP template is layered with thousands of keywords specific to that software category. This encourages a consensus-driven process so you can quickly eliminate vendors and even help you make your final decision transparent and data driven to all stakeholders. This knowledge base is also regularly updated by TEC’s highly trained analyst team.
3. Saves you much time and resources. TEC templates contain more than 25,000 features and functions for more than 40 software categories based on nearly three decades of accumulated data on more than 1,100 software vendors and almost 1,500 products. Our saturated research saves you the huge amount of time and resources you would otherwise invest in vendor due diligence when evaluating potential hidden risks. It also makes it more likely that you’ll reach a verdict faster and more accurately, since our experience helps you sift through marketing rhetoric and target only reliable vendors.
4. Reduce the risks with software selection. TEC templates are based on the accrued experience of our agile-learning needs-based approach with a wide range of companies across more than 24 industries. TEC’s RFP templates are based on data about products we have garnered, and not on vendor hype, which means you’re more likely to save yourself from investing thousands of wasted dollars (and time) on implementation and training on software products that are not aligned with your business needs.

In short, TEC has drafted these RFP templates based on our accumulated experiences in software and evaluation projects and other initiatives such as software reviews in our nearly 30 years of developing expertise in the enterprise software industry.

Role of RFP Document in Software Selection Process 

The request for proposal (RFP) document helps potential buyers explain their product or service needs to vendors. At TEC we use this helpful document in four ways:
 

1. The planning stage of a selection project to shortlist relevant vendors, define a client’s product needs, and to prepare and share a request for information (RFI) across stakeholder and vendor base. In that way, the RFP serves as one transparent shared document.
2. The evaluation stage of a selection project to make sure we’ve covered our shortlisted vendors and to compare and contrast vendor responses. Vendors use the RFP software features list to compare their level of support against a client company’s business and software needs.
3. The actual selection and contract negotiations stage where we use the RFP checklist to create scripted demos that are suitable to the specific needs of a client organization. We also use the RFP to conduct an ROI-driven analysis, and help our clients decide whom to choose for product demos, negotiate contract and cost details, and make the final software selection decision.
4. Implementation oversight and auditing, where the final RFP is a substantial and comprehensive document that we can collaboratively loop back to time and again to check that the client’s system requirements are met.

How to Write a Request for Proposal Template 

There are no hard or fast details on how to write an effective request for proposal template. It makes sense to have sections or statements of work that define the product and the services to be provided. Mark Wolters, a teaching associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, suggests there should be as many as 12 sections in an RFP document. Some companies create so-called life RFPs for lower-value projects while other organizations, in contrast, produce multi-page comprehensive multi-step RFPs. The specific approach your organization takes ultimately depends on your business needs, objectives, and requirements.

Suggestions include the following:
 

• Involve the people that will use the system in the “requirements discovery” process. Together, define the challenges that need to be addressed, the tools they need, and what success will look like. For instance, if your organization seeks to select a new CRM system, opine the sales and marketing teams on their pain points and processes that they would like to have improved and how. Likewise, brief your information technology (IT) team on the must-have, nice-to-have, or outside-of-scope elements of the new sought-after system. Other important teams include finance, legal, and procurement.
• The more specifics you include in the RFP, the better the vendor responses and the easier time you’ll have deciding which vendor (and their implementation partner) to work with. On the other hand, refrain from including too much information. The key is to include just enough information to help vendors match your needs with their products.
• Be as transparent as possible. Provide sufficient information on the background of your business and why you need that product. Include required timeline, deliverable and budget information, along with what you hope to gain from the product (immediate and long-term ROI).
• Define your priorities by including who will evaluate the proposal and how. That helps vendors know what you’re looking for to narrow their selections.
• Don’t rush the responses. It can take vendors several weeks to respond to your RFP.

What’s Included in TEC’s RFP Templates 

TEC’s RFP templates encompass the entire request for x (RFx) processes. This includes:
 

• Request for information (RFI) on vendor and product.
• Request for proposal (RFP), namely the detailed, in-depth information on the vendor and product.
• Request for qualifications (RFQ), history, references, and the like related to the vendor.
• Request for bid (RFB), where you define what you want and ask for the lowest price.
• Request for offer (RFO), where you define your needs and ask vendors to present their bids.

In the case of recurring procurement, there’s also the Vendor Profile (VP), where you can ask vendors to catalog their qualifications and offerings.

Once you've conducted a needs-gap and requirements analysis, summarized responses from stakeholders, built consensus on product needs, and separated the must-haves from the nice-to-haves, you can proceed with the RFP process as follows:

• You’ll distribute the RFP through a selected media channel, or a consultancy such as TEC. TEC manages the end-to-end software evaluation project from RFP creation and distribution to vendor evaluation and selection to contract review and negotiations.

In our case, we provide a thorough consultation that includes reviewing your company, matching your needs to vendors, helping you through the RFP and RFQ processes to establish your total cost of ownership (TCO) for the next 3-5 years and calculating your ROI on shortlisted solutions. We also help you select the right implementation team, negotiate attractive rates, and finalize your contract.
 

• Collect and score vendor responses, such as type and level of support offered for the sought-after functionality sets, through RFP scoring methodologies (contact us for further information on scoring evaluation criteria and methods).
• Perform additional due diligence that includes checking vendor references, reviewing vendor’s track record and experience in your industry, and defining and addressing possible issues.
• Narrow your list of vendors to two or three contenders for scripted product demos, product selection, and product procurement.

Sample RFP Templates & Examples

TEC provides 69 specific RFP templates for all types of software solutions that companies may need for their business, spanning these core categories:
 

• Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Human Capital Management (HCM)
• Business Intelligence (BI) Solutions
• Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
• Content Management Systems (CMS)
• Project and Process Management (PPM)
• Asset Management Software
• Financial Management Software

 

Below we list four examples of specific RFP Templates and what you can expect to find in each.

1. Discrete ERP Software RFP Template
Our RFP Template for discrete manufacturing ERP systems covers more than 3,000 individual features that one would expect to find in discrete ERP systems available on the current market. 
 

 

2. Point of Sale Software RFP Template

Our RFP template for POS systems covers about 1,500 features found across available solutions on the market. It’s divided into categories to make it easier for you to check your business requirements.

 

3. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software RFP Template

Our RFP template for CRM systems lists more than 1,000 features found across available solutions on the market. To make it easier for you and vendors to check items, the template is split into diverse CRM modules and submodules.

 

4. Small Business Software (SBS) RFP Template

Our RFP template for small business software (SBS) selection covers nearly 3,000 features that all startups and small businesses require from enterprise software. We also used our own experience navigating software vendor evaluation when drafting these RFPs. As with the other templates, we organized these features into categories making it easier for you to check off your requirements.

RFP Templates for All Industries or Verticals

TEC’s RFP templates are also categorized according to the specific needs of different industries and verticals. For example, for manufacturing, we have created 12 different templates, to suit the needs of different vertical industries and even different size organizations. We also have 14 ERP RFP templates, so you can see which type of ERP system may best address your business needs. Some of our most popular templates are listed here:

• Discrete manufacturing
• Process manufacturing
• Mixed-mode manufacturing
• Small business software (SBS)
• Small business manufacturing software
• Distribution industries
• Engineer-to-order (ETO)
• Services (non-manufacturing)
• Construction

We provide a free sample of each of our 69 RFP templates, so you can see what each RFP template looks like and whether it may be useful for your business.

Where Do We Go From Here…

TEC’s software RFP templates give you a data-driven single document to find the best software for your business, so you won't lose money and time on what could end up being a costly venture.

A good consensus-driven decision is far easier to achieve when dealing with facts and numbers rather than with impressions. That's what our RFP templates help you achieve. They’re data and experience driven, making it more likely that you’ll find your best-fit software faster and cheaper than most people who draft their RFPs from scratch do.

Ready to learn what a good software solution should be capable of? Or even to start your requirements-gathering process? Have a look at our templates on this page and if you have further questions or need some guidance feel free to contact us and we’ll have a consultant ready to help.