Help Home/Creating Negotiations

RFI's are used to qualify suppliers and their goods and services for subsequent procurement activities. RFIs are used more for gathering information on goods and service provided by a supplier than to lock in particular price information. Therefore, one unique feature of an RFI is that buyers can choose to define negotiation line items without price and quantity and specify lists of criteria to which suppliers must respond. RFIs can be taken to multiple rounds until the buyer has enough information to identify supplier(s) with which to deal. At the conclusion of the RFI cycle, the information contained in the RFI can be copied into an RFQ or buyer's auction.

Creating an RFI

In general, you use the same process to create an RFI that you use to create a buyer's auction or RFQ.

Describe the RFI.

Add line information to the RFI

Specify responsecontrols.

Invite suppliers (possibly optional).

Specifying Criteria for Negotiation

You use line attributes to identify the criteria on which you wish to obtain information from the suppliers who respond to your RFI. For example, assume you're intending to acquire a purchasing application for use within your buying organization. A couple of the product criteria you might be interested in are:

• the level of product support a supplier can provide.

• the specific platforms the product can run on.

When you are defining your negotiation line (purchasing application software), you could add two required line attributes called Support and Platforms. Suppliers would then have to repsond to these line attributes by describing the level of support they can offer and identifying on which platforms their product runs. Note that at this point, you are not concerned yet with negotiating the price, only identifying the most appropriate suppliers. Since you use the attribute fields to specify detailed item information you are interested in, be aware of the following size limits:

• Attribute name: 240 characters

• Target value: 4000 characters

• Response: 4000 characters

Taking an RFI to a subsequent round of responding.

If you defined the response control to allow multiple rounds of responding, you may wish to perform several rounds responding before you feel you have gathered enough information to complete the RFI.

1. To take an RFI to a new round, you must first close it. Once closed, you can return to the negotiation summary page.

2. On the negotiation summary page, select Start New Round from the Actions menu.

3. On the Start New Round page, you can modify many of the attributes of the RFI:

   • RFI Description information - you can change the RFI Title and/or style.

   • RFI Timing information - you can change the open, preview or close dates

   • Collaboration team members.

   • RFI Item information - you can edit or delete existing items, and add new items.

   • Invitee Information - you can invite new suppliers to participate or delete previous invitees.

4. When you have completed entering any new RFI information, click Continue.

5. On the Review and Submit page, check the information, and if correct, click Publish (if the document has approvers defined to the collaboration team, click Submit for Approval).

6. The confirmation page displays information on the new RFI version.

Converting an RFI to an RFQ/Auction

Once you have identified the suppliers with whom you wish to negotiate, you can close the RFI and use the information you've gathered to create an RFQ or auction document. There is no limit to the number of negotiations you can create from a single RFI.

To convert the RFI into an RFQ/Auction:

1. Create the RFI and publish it.

2. Respond as supplier.

3. Close the RFI.

4. Execute Complete from the Actions list.

5. Go to the Negotiations main page.

6. Click Copy link under Create.

7. Enter RFI in the number field.

8. Click Go, then click Copy.

9. Change the Document Type to RFQ and click Apply.