A real RFP, without the theatre

It is 17:04 on a Friday and the deadline was 17:00. Brindlewood’s response lands in the shared mailbox with an apology and a 60 MB zip file, and somebody has to decide whether four minutes count. Nobody writes that decision down.

On Monday the scoring spreadsheet goes round by e-mail. IT fills in the security tab, legal never opens it, and finance types over someone else’s column. By Thursday there are four versions and nobody can say which one is the team’s view.

Nobody in that story did anything wrong. E-mail and a shared drive give a team no way to work on one evaluation, and when a losing bidder asks how the decision was made, the honest answer is a folder of forwarded messages.

Fratera Sourcing gives the whole team one place to work, with the rules built into each step. The example below is an RFP for facilities services in three lots (cleaning, security and maintenance), sent to five suppliers: Corvalo, Brindlewood, Quillon, Tessaro and Marlow.

Write the RFP once, in a form suppliers can answer

You create the tender inside a sourcing project, or continue it from a demand or an offers sheet. The questionnaire has sections, weights and a price weight. Questions marked must be met work as knock-outs, and conditional questions appear only when they apply. If you want to, you can keep the commercial part in a separate envelope.

Start from the question library, which has 11 ready-made starter packs such as security and ESG, or from your own company packs. If your stakeholders would rather write in Excel, the whole RFP goes out to Excel and comes back in. Preview as supplier shows you what the bidders will see before they see it.

The price sheet holds lots and lines with planned quantities, with today’s price as the baseline. Suppliers can mark No bid on a line or a whole lot and offer alternatives on lines of their own. When you Issue the tender, version 1 of the documents is frozen.

The file that arrived four minutes late

Each supplier gets a link and a one-time code. They don’t need an account or a password, and they can bring in colleagues and give them sections to answer. Before any document opens, they accept your terms of participation. The timeline shows every phase and date in the supplier’s own time zone, so a 17:00 deadline in Prague is never read as 17:00 in Lisbon.

They answer online or offline in Excel, price online or upload the price sheet by item code, and attach files of up to 100 MB. Each submission produces a receipt, on screen and by e-mail. Before the deadline a supplier can submit again or withdraw. After it, Fratera refuses the submission, so the four-minute question never reaches your desk.

The must-have nobody checked

Responses stay sealed until a named opener opens them, and Fratera checks every response against its receipt, so the file you evaluate is the file the supplier sent. Must-be-met questions are checked by rule, and the compliance heatmap shows every supplier against every one of them. In the example Marlow misses the €10m liability cover and is excluded, with the reason recorded.

If you used the separate commercial envelope, prices can stay sealed until quality is signed off.

The scoring spreadsheet with four versions

Each section of the questionnaire goes to the colleagues who know it: IT scores information security, legal the contract terms and finance the commercials. Evaluators don’t need a paid seat. Each one declares any conflict of interest and scores 0 to 5 with a comment, and their scores combine into one team view. Where two evaluators are far apart, the moderator sees it and agrees the final score with a reason.

The score heatmap then puts every supplier against every section, coloured by score, so you see the strengths and gaps at once, even with a long list of suppliers. Each supplier’s result combines its quality score with its price score, using the weights you set in the questionnaire, and every lot gets its own ranking, with tie-breaks.

The answer only one bidder heard

Suppliers ask questions in the workspace or send them as an Excel list, and hundreds per supplier is fine. Your team drafts the answers together, and Fratera publishes each one anonymised to every bidder. When Tessaro asks about night-shift cover on lot 2, all five suppliers get the answer and none of them learns who asked.

An answer that changes the scope becomes an addendum. Deadline rules make sure suppliers always get enough notice to respond, and a What changed view shows them what moved. The full Q&A log exports to Excel or PDF for your file.

The letters nobody sends

You can award the whole tender or lot by lot. In the example, Corvalo wins cleaning and security and Brindlewood wins maintenance.

All five suppliers get a letter, including the three who won nothing. You can add a debrief with the supplier’s own section scores and its place. Tessaro sees where it lost points on maintenance and where it finished. It never sees another bidder’s prices.

The standstill period runs, then you Confirm award. If the tender has to stop, you cancel it with a reason. Supplier access closes after the tender.

The winning offer, retyped into a contract

In a lot of companies the tender ends at award and someone opens a contract template. They retype the supplier, the prices, the currency and the dates, and a year later nobody is sure the contract matches the bid.

In Fratera the award becomes the contract. It comes pre-filled with the awarded supplier, prices, currency, dates and yearly value schedule, one contract per winner. The example ends with two: one for Corvalo covering two lots, and one for Brindlewood.

From there the contract goes through redlining of the supplier’s Word document, approval routed by your delegation of authority and e-signature, then on into renewal dates and obligations. That route has its own article: from demand to signature, in one place.

Run your next tender in it

The Sourcing edition includes everything in Pro SRM, plus e-sourcing and collaborative redlining, and you can try it on the normal 14-day trial. Suppliers need only their link and one-time code. Put a real RFP through it, and tell us where it doesn’t fit the way you buy.