An RFP constitutes an invitation to proponents describing the intent and concerns of the organization issuing the RFP and prescribing how proponents are to respond.
The project description will usually set out a general description of the organization’s requirements including location constraints: information on space requirements; performance requirements and other technical specifications, warranty and maintenance requirements; and other factors that the organization intends to consider in the award of the contract.
The performance and service requirements set out in the project description will usually constitute the minimum requirements. Proponents will be invited to bring forward base level proponents that address these minimum requirements. In addition, proponents will also be encouraged to investigate and recommend enhanced value options, including optional features or higher-grade products which will result in improved performance, a more cost-effective solution or that otherwise better meet the stated requirements.
When awarding the contract, a properly structured RFP process allows the issuing organization to consider the full range of options, amenities and enhancement features offered by a proponent. The organization will reserve the right to award the contract based solely upon the evaluation criteria set out in the RFP, even if the effect of so doing is to cause the contract to be awarded to a contractor other than the one that submitted the lowest proposal. Thus, proposal evaluation is a critical aspect of the award of the contract.
The theoretical goals of the proposal evaluation process itself can be summarized simply enough in the following two statements:
The process should be transparent; it should be possible for an objective third party to see how decisions were made.
The process should be fair. The proposals should be evaluated on the criteria that were established when proposals were solicited (subject to such modifications as may have been properly brought to the notice of the proponents). Unless such fairness prevails, the organization has no certainty that the proposals it is evaluating will offer the best possible combination of price and functionality.
That at least is the theory. Unfortunately, it is often only during the process of proposal evaluation that the fundamental flaws, if any, of the specifications become evident. When it is discovered that the specifications are poorly conceived, it is usually in one or all of the following areas:
- Important requirements were left out of the specifications;
- Specifications included in the process prove to be irrelevant to functionality; and
- Specifications are redundant.
Such deficiencies result from a range of causes, including a lack of understanding of product availability within the market and the tendency of proponents to bid on the specifications. In other words, tell suppliers that to get the contract, they must have experience walking on the moon, and by strange coincidence when the bid comes in, all of them will claim to have been part of the Apollo space program.
In addition, there can also be problems peculiar to the evaluation process itself, most frequently:
- The weighting of evaluation criteria is unrealistic;
- There are too many criteria of assessment; and
- The criteria of assessment are too subjective, that it is difficult to reconcile or justify the approach that evaluators have taken towards scoring.
If the evaluators are not properly qualified to carry out an assessment (at least with respect to particular aspects of the assessment criteria), this is essentially no more than a problem in assembling the evaluation team in the manner of assigning work to that team, which can usually be circumvented by including language in the contract documents along the following lines:
“The evaluation team may include such members of the [organization’s] staff and outside consultants as the [organization] considers necessary or advisable to provide proper technical and financial evaluation of the proposals received.”
Stephen Bauld is a government procurement expert and can be reached at swbauld@purchasingci.com.
Some of his columns may contain excerpts from The Municipal Procurement Handbook published by Butterworths.
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