Hi Louise:
At Lakeland Electric, we recently purchased a WFM system by RFP. It is a great way to get vendors to compete for your attention, pitch the lowest possible price and give full disclosure about what features they do and do not offer.
As a public utility, it is a legal requirement that the winning bid contract terms and pricing are is published in full.
http://www.lakelandgov.net/agendas/09-08-09/X-C%20-%20StratasoftSoftwareK.pdf
The vendor’s don’t particularly like the publication of their contract -- but it’s a bonus to prospective buyers.
Reviewing one of these disclosures is a great way for prospective buyers to gauge the going rate after someone else has done the hard work of making the vendors compete with each other. Don’t forget that you can continue to negotiate with the winning bidder to get more of what you want. In our case the proposed contract was very favorable in that we got a perpetual license and many other entitlements that we thought we were going to have to fight for. Even still we asked for and received concessions in the area of the annual maintenance rate and staging the purchase.
My advice is to ask for the maximum number of licenses you think you’ll ever need. This will give you the best volume discount. Once a bidder wins the RFP, ask to purchase the licenses in stages.
Building the RFP is critical. We asked for a lot of detail on available features and made the important ones mandatory. For example we asked for evidence that the system could generate consistent schedules as we know that random schedules are a big problem with many systems. Correctly interpreting long calls that last longer than a planning interval was another mandatory. We also wanted the ability to annotate historical call spikes.
In addition to the specialty requirements above, we also asked for the full spectrum of features that are offered by most WFM Vendors. This included shift trading, vacation bidding, vacation accrual, real time & historical adherence, forecast tuning tools, seasonalization, payroll reconciliation, performance measurement, reporting, schedule re-optimization, exception tracking, etc.
Vendors tend to put a lot of screen captures in an RFP responses to demonstrate compliance. Reviewing a good RFP response gives the buyer a good sense for how feature rich and user friendly a WFM solution will be.
We also made it mandatory that the system be fully web based and available on premise. Web based solutions that were only available hosted were excluded from bidding.
Finally, we asked for references as part of the RFP and verified them prior to signing.
The RFP process worked out well for us because we got everything we wanted and more for a great price.
Thanks, Karen |