Final agreements or contracts are laid out in a “Narrative Form”, i.e., as a normal document in portrait orientation. For the purposes of a Request for Proposal (RFP) process, a “Tabular Form” in landscape orientation can be helpful to solicit provider responses. When evaluating RFP response documents in Tabular Form, a “ReportCard“, i.e., a special-purpose Tabular Form with additional columns for ratings or comments, for example, can come in handy as well.
DokuMate includes both templates for the three document forms (i.e., Narrative, Tabular, ReportCard) and functionality for transforming documents between those forms. For example, DokuMate will allow you to:
- develop RFP or contract documents in Narrative Form (because it’s easier to write produce narrative documents);
- transform documents from Narrative into Tabular Form just before issuing the RFP;
- transform RFP responses in Tabular Form into ReportCards before distributing them to the team for evaluation;
- consolidate multiple ReportCards into one once you’ve received those ReportCards back from the team;
- strip selected columns from the ReportCards, creating another Tabular Form for sharing comments with providers; and
- transform negotiated documents in Tabular Form into Narrative Form.
All of the document transformations can be done with individual documents and whole folders of documents. And any of the above transformations performed on a folder containing 30-40 RFP or contract documents should take (much) less than 30 seconds on a modern notebook. But you can still go ahead and grab that coffee …