Appendix C: Components of a Traditional RFP

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Section I - General Information
Section II - The Institution and Information Technology
Section III - Business Process Requirements
Section IV - Other Requirements
Section V - Proposal Format and Instructions

Section I - General Information

Introduction

The introduction should state the basic objectives of the RFP (as identified in chapter 5, Issuing a Request for Proposals), identify the confidential nature of the RFP as a valuable document of the institution containing information pertinent to its operations, and provide an overview of the remaining sections to orient prospective suppliers.

Schedule of Key Events

This subsection highlights major activities associated with the issue of the RFP: proposal dates, site visits or demonstrations, contract awards, and implementation objectives. This provides valuable information for suppliers in responding to the schedule and resource requirements of the bid. Schedules will obviously be subject to change at the discretion of the institution.

Response Terms and Conditions

This subsection provides information to suppliers to identify the formal procedure surrounding the RFP process. It may include how vendors should provide notice of intent to bid, the date and location for delivery of proposals, and the process of requesting clarification on any item included in the RFP. This allows the institution to control the process internally by providing defined contacts for the suppliers. This process may include identifying that the requests for clarification and the subsequent response will be copied to all suppliers, thus keeping them all apprised of information.

This subsection may also provide some basic definitions that will protect the institution:

Rules for bidders' conferences
Right to amend or supplement the information
Hold-harmless clauses
Evaluation period
Price changes
Assignment or subcontracting
Payment schedule
Insurance
Award of contract (official approval process and notification)
News releases and confidentiality

To some extent these may be considered as "boiler plate" items that can be lifted from standard contracts. The institution's legal counsel should review these to ensure the institution is not at risk.

Vendor Eligibility and Selection Criteria

This subsection is designed to allow the institution to eliminate potential suppliers who do not meet specific requirements of the project and/or to allow a potential supplier to decide not to bid. This is extremely valuable to the selection team since it can significantly reduce the number of alternatives that need to be taken into consideration throughout the process.

The information will outline the institution's expectations, which may be related to the supplier's experience in the marketplace, installations at comparable sites (for example, community colleges or research universities), installations at sites with comparable volumes (number of students, faculty, total staff, general ledger accounts), availability of systems that integrate, as an example, student information systems and financial information systems, and systems with specific technical architecture (e.g., client/server technology or rapid application development tools). These kinds of criteria will obviously vary from institution to institution, and can be identified as "knock out" criteria. This concept, which tends to facilitate the progress of the evaluation team, was discussed previously in chapter 5.

The eligibility criteria may focus on primary eligibility criteria and general evaluation criteria. The primary eligibility criteria tend to be highly visible items that will become quickly apparent and tend to eliminate alternatives at an early stage. The general evaluation criteria identify items that will probably be evaluated as part of the proposal and evaluation process. It would include items such as overall ability to meet requirements, supplier's financial health and stability, ability to meet data conversion needs, compliance with standard audit control procedures, quality of site visits, and characteristics of proposed hardware and software. The presentation of these criteria in this subsection will tend to make potential suppliers think through the process and determine if they want to bid on the project.

Section II - The Institution and Information Technology

The purpose of this section is to indicate to suppliers the importance of an effective ongoing relationship with the institution in achieving its information technology goals and objectives. These characteristics can involve short-term and long-term objectives and indicate the need for the supplier to be in a continual development mode with its products and services.

Overview of the Institution

This subsection provides historical and environmental data about the institution to the suppliers. The information could include the mission of the institution, the governance, size and location, initiatives that are indicative of the institution's administrative and academic directions and challenges, and an organization chart of the major areas of the institution.

Strategic Direction of Technology

This subsection is tailored to the strategic vision of the institution and points out to the supplier the information that the institution believes is important to allow the supplier to share and participate in that vision. It will provide information to support the strategic statements in the steering committee's strategic directions report.

Typical of the content of this section would be:

The mission-critical nature of excellence in information systems and technologies.
Strategies related to the internal system development philosophy of the institution. This will indicate to suppliers the role that the in-house resources of the institution may play in the project. This information will provide insight into the extent to which the institution is looking at buy, build, or partner solutions.
The strategy surrounding the transition to a new financial information system, including a description of the technology infrastructure to support the business process required by the institution, the transaction processing orientation of the system, and the institution's need for supplier support resources for technical and user staff in the planning, project management, training, testing, and installation of the required business applications. The information may also indicate the needed supplier support for the conversion of databases and the skill development of the institution's technical and user staff. This area is obviously projecting into the implementation and identifying the levels of support, training, and documentation that will be expected from the supplier.
The future technology direction of the institution. This will be described to indicate that the institution needs to have ongoing enhancement to the system. These areas could include the kinds of future technology described in the technology evaluation discussion and would emphasize those areas related to access, graphical user interfaces, decision support systems, client/server architecture, and other areas of new technology which the institution wishes to pursue.
Strategic issues related to cost/benefit considerations where the institution will describe its focus on cost/benefit issues and the added value of new and enhanced system. This discussion can include insight into the institution's concept of partnering with the supplier using internal staff to encourage new development and maintain costs. The supplier's input on improved productivity of existing staff resources can also be covered in this area.

Description of existing technological environment

This subsection provides suppliers with information on the existing technology environment of the institution. This could include such information as:

Existing administrative computing services -- purpose of the department, organization, staffing, and location. The capability of the existing staff to deal with issues contained in the strategic section and in current projects and workload can be identified.

Existing application systems -- description of the major applications currently in production, basic modules of each application, and any specific functions that may not be standard in the industry, including leading-edge technologies already in operation.

Existing hardware and software systems -- a detailed description of production and development hardware and operating software, number of workstations, terminals, printers, and other devices in the central environment, including:

major operating software, programming languages, and report generation capability;
networking capabilities (including network applications), servers, and types of wiring and communications cabling;
user department workstations, terminals, and printers, including distributed applications if applicable; and
other technology information that may be useful to the supplier in responding to the short-term and long-term needs of the institution.

Section III - Business Process Requirements

This section describes the application requirements of the institution. These requirements can be presented in subsections that cover General Application Requirements and Specific Application Requirements.

General Application Requirements

This subsection describes the function and feature requirements that are common to all the application software modules as well as those system-level functions that will be used by the user community.

These requirements describe key features that are deemed to be critical to the institution's user community. They tend to indicate the infrastructure of applications and common threads upon which the system should operate. To some extent, this information will indicate the extent to which application modules are integrated into a comprehensive business system.

In general, this subsection allows the business process and technology teams to identify what they consider to be critical items without repeating the items in each specific application requirement. These issues will normally be generated as a result of developing requirements and participating in consciousness-raising activities with various suppliers and other institutions. While the issues will be tailored by the individual institution, the following may give some indications on the content of this subsection:

Outside agencies that have validated one or more parts of the system for accuracy and consistency with industry standards
Maintenance agreements
Support plan for customers
Indicators of an integrated system -- common database and nonduplicated data elements, security, screens, automatic updating of financial records from student registration or payroll transactions
Optional features that may be turned on and off and which may affect performance
Backup, recovery, and transaction-logging features
Documentation/online documentation available to users
Ability to navigate between applications without lengthy sign-on procedures
Support for network facilities such as uploading and downloading of files to and from workstations
Archiving and retrieval of archived data
Remote printing capability/report generation capabilities
Support for future applications not described in the Specific Application Requirements: inventory management, smart card, Internet/Web access, equipment tracking, facilities management
Customization performed for and by other customers that could be available

Specific Application Requirements

This subsection describes the function and feature requirements of the user community for all specific applications. This is the section that the suppliers may be required to copy, complete, and return to the institution; it is the most specific, detailed section of the RFP.

This subsection results from documentation on the features and functions, which may be classified as essential or desirable. This indicates to the supplier the relative importance of each line item. The scoring on these items may allow the supplier to respond in different ways to the line items. One technique that can be used in an RFP allows for the following responses by suppliers:

Feature or function currently exists and can be demonstrated
Feature or function exists, but must be modified prior to implementation to meet specific requirements
Not currently available, but will be provided prior to implementation at no extra charge
Not currently available, but will be provided prior to scheduled implementation at an additional cost identified in the cost section
Feature or function not included in proposal

The responses in this format will quickly identify the "gap" between customer expectation and supplier product capability. The gap list can be used to identify potential custom development, internal development, or partnering strategies.

In the typical financial information system document, a sample Specific Application sheet could appear as shown below. The major point of this or other methods of presenting requirements is to provide a detailed list of business application requirements while providing flexibility between essential and desirable as well as flexibility in the suppliers' responses. This section is a comprehensive section since it will contain all the detail on all the business processes covered by the project.

General Ledger System

The system should support multiple agencies	A B C D [E]
Ability to accomodate different fiscal years for different accounts	A B C D [E]
Automatically summarize inter-fund debit and credit transactions to a summary transaction when the debit and credit transactions occur within the same account	A B C D [E]
Ability to initiate budget transfers online	A B C [D] E

Section IV - Other Requirements

This section describes the technical requirements and requests specific information (which will include cost information) in technical and support areas.

Implementation and Support Requirements

This subsection describes requirements for supplier deliverables for implementation of the proposed system and would include items such as the following:

Detailed implementation work plan and progress reporting system
Overall direction for software loading and file conversions
Establishment of production and test systems
Provision of formal training on each module for users consistent with the implementation schedule
On-site assistance and telephone assistance
Post-implementation support to fine tune the system

System Level Software and Technical Requirements

This subsection requests information on a variety of topics related to implementation and the overall system capability:

System security -- covers security levels, password implementation and maintenance, special features for standard profiles, handling of unauthorized attempts to access the system, levels of security
Database management -- describes data access methods, tools and report generators available, any file or data limits, maintenance requirements, and database recovery capabilities
Query/report writer -- requests information on formatting, data access, real-time report generation from the database, ability to project query run times, ability to extract and download, user friendliness
Application development tools -- identifies functions, features, benefits, and training requirements of available software development tools
Connectivity -- describes support for one or more network communication disciplines, remote terminals, and printers
Teleprocessing, operating systems, and system utilities required for production operations -- includes job scheduling, peripheral management system

Hardware Requirements

This subsection requests specific information on hardware proposals. The focus in this section is to ensure the capacity of the system and the performance of the system. The information provided in various sections of the RFP has identified the volume of transactions across applications, the number of users, and the configuration of terminals and workstations. The supplier needs to respond with a hardware configuration that will support these stated volumes. This subsection will also address some of the more pragmatic production operation issues in terms of print volume, magnetic tape backup and recovery capability, and the ability to monitor performance and fine tune the system.

Section V - Proposal Format and Instructions

This section is designed to manage the response to the RFP and provide specific instructions on how suppliers need to respond, including any standard forms to be used. The sequence of this section mirrors the layout of the RFP.

Outline of Proposal Format

This subsection outlines the format and can include:

Notice of intent to bid

Cover letter
Supplier statement of ability to meet primary eligibility criteria
Supplier financial data

Proposed solution

Table of contents
Transmittal letter
Total system solution
Supplier qualifications
Application software requirements
System-level software and technical requirements
Hardware requirements
Proposed implementation schedule and level of effort
Any additional information
Exceptions to the RFP (supplier identifies specific areas where they are unable to meet one or more areas of the RFP)
Sample contracts

Cost proposal

This is a separate section that allows the supplier to provide the cost information separate from the system proposal information.

Sample documentation

This could include samples of supplier documentation for users, operators, data entry, technical staff, plus any additional material that will identify the availability and quality of the documentation.

Description of Proposal Sections

This subsection provides detailed information on each of the steps summarized in the outline above.

Standard Forms for Responses

This subsection provides standard forms that will provide a consistent method for all suppliers' responses, and makes comparison more straightforward. Forms included in the package should reflect the content of the RFP, so that suppliers can be led through the responses to each section. Separate forms can be provided for the suppliers to identify cost information so that the functional responses can be reviewed and evaluated separately from the cost information. If required, forms for purchase options and lease options can be provided.

Appendices

Information that will assist the supplier in further understanding of the institution can be included in appendices.

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