A Request for Information (RFI) sourcing document is different from other sourcing documents such as RFQ or buyer's auction. The purpose of RFQs and buyer's auctions is to negotiate line price and costs prior to generating a purchasing document.
The purpose of an RFI is to gather information on goods and services a supplier company provides. RFIs may or may not be concerned with line price or costs. Buyers use responses to an RFI to qualify suppliers early in the procurement process. RFIs typically run to several rounds as buyers continually refine the groups of suppliers who can most closely supply the products and services the buyer is looking for. Once the appropriate group of suppliers has been identified, the RFI can be converted to an RFQ or buyer's auction, and the buyer can initiate a regular price/cost negotiation with the targeted suppliers.
To respond to an RFI:
From the Negotiations Home page, search for any open RFIs or RFIs to which you've been specifically invited. RFIs to which you've been invited will appear under Open Invitations. You can find open RFIs by entering search values in the Search Open Negotiations fields and clicking Go.
From the Results: Active Negotiations, select the RFI to which you wish to respond and click Respond.
On the Terms and Conditions page, either accept or reject the negotiations conditions.
On the Create Response page, enter response values as you normally would when bidding or quoting online. If the buyer chose to include the Price and Quantity fields, you are required to provide values for these fields. Otherwise, the Price and Quantity fields are display only and you cannot enter anything in them .
Since the purpose of an RFI is to obtain product and service related information for a negotiation line, most negotiation lines in an RFI have attributes defined. These line attributes identify the questions the buyer has about a particular line. Line attributes appear under the Lines section of the Create Response page. The Attribute Type column shows you whether a response is required or optional. If the buyer has chosen to display an attribute target, this value appears in the Target Value column . When entering responses, be aware of the following size limits:
Attribute: 240 characters
Target: 4000 characters
Response: 4000 characters
When you have responded to all required and optional line attributes, click Continue
On the Create Response: Review and Submit page, verify your response values. If correct, click Submit.