Request for Proposal Process

Let’s use a Request for Proposal (RFP) process as an example use case for explaining how a sourcing advisor or legal counsel you would use DokuMate:

1. Create a Narrative Template for your project to reflect your client’s corporate identity. Using one of the default DokuMate templates or a previous project template as a starting point, change the title page, logo, headers, footers, fonts, etc. as required. Optionally, create corresponding Tabular and ReportCard Templates for use in later stages of the process.
2. Obtain the set of documents in Narrative Form that you are going to use as a starting point for the RFP. Let’s assume, those documents are in a House Style-compliant form already.
3. Apply your project-specific template to the set of documents, using the Apply Template / To Selected Documents… function. This will change your original documents.
4. Use that client-specific set of documents in Narrative Form when producing the client-specific RFP, checking Lock Form for those documents that should be issued in Narrative Form and leaving Lock Form unchecked for documents that should be transformed into Tabular Form.
5. Just before issuing the RFP, use the Tabular Form / Transform Folder to Narrative House Style… function to transform the whole set of client-specific RFP documents into their final form for releasing the RFP to the providers. The documents having Lock Form unchecked will be transformed into Tabular Form. The documents having Lock Form checked will remain unchanged and stay in Narrative Form. You will end up with a complete set of documents (just in  different form). Your original documents will not be changed in that process.
6. When receiving the responses back from the providers, use the To ReportCard / Transform Folder to ReportCard… to transform the tabular response documents into ReportCards having additional columns (e.g., ratings and comments). Narrative documents will be copied to the destination folder so you’ll have a complete set of response documents (just in a different form). Your original documents will not be changed in that process.
7. When receiving the ReportCards back from the team members who evaluated and commented on the responses using their individual copies of the ReportCards, use the Merge ReportCards function to consolidate the collective feedback. For each RFP document, e.g., MSA, Schedule, Exhibit, or Attachment in the ReportCard format, open the corresponding master ReportCard, click Merge ReportCards, select the ReportCards to be merged, click Open, and wait two or three seconds for the magic to happen.
8. Should you want to share the comments, but not the ratings, with the providers, you can quickly create a tabular template by copying the ReportCard Template and removing the ratings column from your copy. You would then use To Tabular Form / Transform Folder to Tabular House Style… to strip the ratings column from the ReportCards.
9. Assuming your negotiation finally produced tabular documents having the agreed wording in the customer column, you would then use To Narrative Form / Transform Folder to Narrative House Style… to produce the final contract documents.

DokuMate makes it easy to process sets of documents, e.g., whole folders (with subfolders) or individually selected documents. And while it processes those documents, DokuMate should never force you to grab a coffee (or whatever drink you prefer). In the author’s real-life tests, transforming batches of documents took roughly half a second per document on average. So, if you assume something around .5 to 1 second per document, processing even the largest RFPs takes less than a minute (and most often less than 30 seconds).

Merging ReportCards is currently a per-document activity. Future releases will likely turn that into a whole-document-set type of operation. But it is still a massive time saver. While it can take an hour or more to consolidate feedback for a single set of ReportCards, DokuMate does that in roughly 2 seconds.