Buying and Implementing Technology For Treasury Professionals : How to select the vendors?

In this episode of Treasury Tuesday, Taylor Herron, Digital Transformation Advisor at HighRadius briefly discussed the 3 major components of structuring an RFP and subsequently selecting vendors:

• Documentation
• Analytics
• Extended/On-site demo.

Requests for Proposals or RFPs form an essential component of the process of selecting vendors. These documents state the business requirements of the organization and request proposals of vendors to demonstrate how they can provide solutions.

Structuring an RFP appropriately is vital to process the subsequent vendor proposals optimally without much hassle.

Documentation:

The documentation includes the questions that are generally asked by the issuer to the prospective vendors.

• Asking the relevant and strategic questions is essential for both focussing on key business requirements and saving time while scanning through long vendor proposals.
• Questions should be broken down to easily identifiable parameters. Then these parameters can be then evaluated using a scorecard.
• In addition to questions, general information like currency, legal entities, and bank account details which are common queries of each vendor should be included in the documentation.
• Finally, the documentation must compulsorily include pricing and deadlines

Secrets to an effective RFP :

• An Introduction with details of the company.
• A brief history of the project.
• A succinct definition of the project’s requirements.
• Clear mention of the format for vendor’s response (with in-detailed pricing).
• Well-defined selection criteria.
• Distinct timelines.

Analysis:

For analysis of the vendor proposals following a structured approach is also essential:

• Preparing the scorecard beforehand can simplify the evaluation process. While evaluating some business requirements more than others should be done to segregate proposals according to their relevancy of solving the most essential business requirements.
• A uniform scoring pattern should be followed to maintain homogeneity. Scoring across categories will help in the easy evaluation and further analysis.
• Moreover finding vendors who are providing solutions that are more functionally fit to the organization is more important than vendors who are offering better pricing.
• Finally keeping a note of essential information is needed to keep track of all vendor applications and finally choose the best fit.

On-site demo:

On-site demonstrations by vendors can provide more intricate details about the working of their products. Thus involving all important stakeholders and key company personnel relevant to the product is essential.

• It is expected that the vendor will have a tailored presentation for the company-specific needs.
• Finally asking relevant questions to clarify all doubts and finding how to fit the product should be the key takeaway from such demos.

The final step of the entire process revolves around vendor selection and negotiations. Join us in the next episode where Sean Malcolm, VP of sales at Highradius discusses the same in detail.