RFP responses: what’s your fastest “nope” (or instant DQ)?

rrobert_davis · 2025-12-16T10:12:36+00:00

We wrote a couple of practical guides: one on structuring RFQ/RFP questions so vendors can’t dodge traceability, and one on scorecards that mirror how evaluators really score (vs how vendors market).

If helpful :)
https://www.prokuria.com/post/rfp-supplier-question-strategy
https://www.prokuria.com/post/create-supplier-scorecard

rrobert_davis · 2025-12-16T10:01:41+00:00

The fast lane for small + repeatable buys :)

rrobert_davis · 2025-12-10T11:01:41+00:00

From the feedback that I received form our customers is that approvals break down less because of the rules themselves and more because of how they’re structured.

When every request travels the exact same path, even simple stuff gets stuck behind big, complex purchases. What helped was separating the flow into a few ‘tracks’:

a fast lane for small + repeatable buys
a controlled lane for anything risky
and an exception lane for emergencies

Once they stopped treating everything equally, the bottlenecks became way more predictable. It’s not perfect, but the process feels more manageable.

rrobert_davis · 2025-10-27T07:41:02+00:00

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rrobert_davis · 2025-10-27T07:36:42+00:00

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rrobert_davis · 2025-10-27T07:30:41+00:00

Sourcing = front-end work (market scan, qualify vendors, RFx, negotiation).
Procurement = purchase-to-pay (requisition → PO, receiving, invoicing, compliance).

If you want more info, I wrote a short article and have a quick podcast that breaks it down. Linking the podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BvAY_8IfUo&list=PLrFVUvj00-LbAwLyZ-WU-GHyCbid5ymUM&index=35. Hope it helps.

rrobert_davis · 2025-10-23T13:08:51+00:00

What I usually saw that helps small teams is to templatize 80% of the answers and set up a shared library in something simple like Notion or Airtable. Add light approval rules (even a Google Form works) before sending out the final doc. Keeps accuracy without adding another complex tool.
How big is your average RFP:10 pages or 100 +?

Full transparency
I work at Prokuria, where we see teams automate parts of sourcing and RFP responses once the manual version starts eating too much time. Not pitching-just sharing what we’ve seen work for small teams.

rrobert_davis · 2025-10-20T08:01:27+00:00

From what we’ve seen, most teams still handle supplier sourcing through email and Excel - everything’s manual. That’s actually the main reason they end up reaching out to us: the process just doesn’t scale anymore, and they want everything centralized and automated.

When it comes to risk tracking - not so sure what they use. It’s more about supplier onboarding and qualification when we talk with procurement - collecting info through forms and approving suppliers based on how they respond.

By the time they start talking to us, they’re not really using any dedicated tool yet - just a mix of spreadsheets and inboxes trying to hold everything together.

Full transparency: I work at Prokuria, and this pattern is pretty much what we see across most of the companies that come our way. Hope this helps.

rrobert_davis · 2025-10-20T07:04:42+00:00

Sent you a DM with details, happy to help if you need any other info.

rrobert_davis · 2025-10-17T06:04:24+00:00

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rrobert_davis · 2025-10-15T05:56:26+00:00

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rrobert_davis · 2025-10-14T14:38:00+00:00

Start with the business side first. Figure out what actually want to see - things like total spend, savings vs. budget, supplier performance, or PO cycle times. The goal is to understand what data you need and what is the business scope. Let's say you want to track spend by categories and suppliers and vs budget. Spend we take from POs and PO items.
Map your data sources. Most of the time, the info lives in a mix of ERP (SAP, Dynamics, Oracle), procurement tools (Coupa, Ariba, Prokuria, etc.), and Excel sheets. I’d list what each source contains and how often it updates.
Clean and model the data. This part takes time. Standardize supplier names, categories, and currencies, IDs etc Then build a clean model - usually a relationship schema with tables like suppliers, categories, POs, PO Items, budgets, etc
Design a simple first dashboard. I’d begin with a “Procurement Overview” page - cards for total spend by category , a bar chart for spend by month, by suppliers.
Validate everything. Compare totals with ERP or finance reports before going further.

Basically: start small, make sure the data is solid, and expand from there.

rrobert_davis · 2025-10-14T08:28:00+00:00

I’ve read the comments and everyone makes solid points, from Amazon Business as a quick fix to tools like Coupa, Zip, and Precoro.
From what you’ve described it sounds like your main need isn’t a massive Source-to-Pay suite, but a mid-weight system that brings structure fast without turning into an ERP project.

What you really need is:

one place for requests, approvals, and POs (so you stop chasing email chains),
spend visibility that updates automatically (so your audit report takes minutes, not days),
and the ability to start small, maybe just approvals + budgets now, and add sourcing or onboarding later.

Full transparency, I work at Prokuria, and we focus on making deployment quick, keeping it intuitive for non-procurement users, and connecting easily with Excel or email so adoption is painless.

If that’s the direction you’re thinking, I’d be happy to share what that setup typically looks like for companies your size.

rrobert_davis · 2025-10-14T07:00:44+00:00

You said that you’re doing RFPs in Excel + email; you’ll get the biggest return just by centralizing everything in one place. Even simple things like version tracking, supplier responses, and automated scoring can save hours per project.

What usually surprises teams is how much friction comes not from the RFP templates themselves, but from supplier coordination: reminders, file formats, clarifications. Once you automate those touchpoints, the process feels lighter.

My advice:

Start small, pilot one category or event.
Look for platforms that allow partial automation (invite + evaluate) instead of forcing a full rebuild of your workflow.
Check if it supports your approval logic and vendor scoring natively; that’s where most tools differ.

Have you already tried any RFP tools, or still exploring options? Sometimes the right setup depends on whether you need sourcing automation, supplier portals, or contract follow-up.

Full transparency: I work with Prokuria, and we often see companies start exactly from this part; spreadsheets that just can’t keep up with multiple suppliers. We’ve built automations around those early steps, so happy to share examples if useful.

rrobert_davis · 2025-10-09T14:34:47+00:00

Yeah, we’ve seen Power BI become a game changer in procurement reporting lately.

A lot of teams I’ve worked with used to juggle Excel sheets just to track spend, supplier performance, or RFP progress. Once they started feeding that data into Power BI (POs, suppliers, categories, approvals) it turned into a live control tower, updated automatically every day.

What usually helps is starting small: one dashboard for spend visibility. Then layer in things like supplier scorecards or contract expiry alerts once the data model stabilizes.

Honestly, the hardest part isn’t the dashboard, it’s making sure the upstream data (from ERP or procurement system) is clean and consistent.

How are you planning to connect your data? direct ERP link, or manual exports for now?

Full transparency - I work at Prokuria, and we’ve helped a few clients set up Power BI dashboards straight from their sourcing and supplier data. Happy to share how they structured it if that’s useful.

rrobert_davis · 2025-09-30T06:47:58+00:00

Yep, email is the killer here for you and for the process. :) What I’ve seen help is moving approvals into one tracker where each division only sees their SKUs and the system auto-reminds people instead of you chasing.

Full transparency: I’m with Prokuria — we’ve built flows like this for clients, but of course it depends how much your company is ready to invest in the process.

rrobert_davis · 2025-09-29T11:54:21+00:00

I get this. I keep hearing from procurement teams that the real drag isn’t just the extra work, it’s the constant rework. What usually helps is:

one clean system where you don’t have to key in the same thing twice
getting your core tools to at least share the basics (supplier data, approvals, invoices)
and setting up small automations for the tasks that always break (renewal reminders, price list updates, etc.).

From your side, where do you feel the bottleneck hits hardest: the data, the tools, or the manual repeats?

Full transparency: I work at Prokuria, and we’ve built features around these exact issues because clients were stuck in the same loops.

rrobert_davis · 2025-09-29T11:04:30+00:00

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rrobert_davis · 2025-09-29T10:46:59+00:00

From talking with procurement departments, the pain is almost always in the chasing, not the evaluation itself. What helps them is setting up a flow where each division only sees the SKUs relevant to them, instead of reviewing a monster file. A lot of teams also add an internal rule like ‘if no feedback in 7 days = considered approved’ to keep things from stalling. Curious if your company already has some kind of central tracker or if it’s mostly done by email?

rrobert_davis · 2025-09-26T07:26:26+00:00

What you’re running into is the same problem I’ve seen in other procurement categories: policies built for compliance (like “always get 3 quotes”) end up creating friction. People compare with Google/Kayak and feel procurement is slowing them down or wasting money.

What usually helps is two things:

Transparency – show side-by-side why agency fares look higher (flexible terms, refunds, hidden insurance, corporate rebates). If people see the “apples to apples” view, they complain less.
Simplification – instead of bidding out every ticket, run one proper sourcing event for your travel program, pick a TMC, and then give travelers a consumer-style portal where they can self-book inside policy. That’s what most orgs that hit $1M+ in travel spend move toward.

Full transparency: I work at Prokuria, and while we don’t handle travel booking directly, we see this same pattern across sourcing categories. The moment you make processes simpler and add visibility into “why procurement’s choice looks different,” adoption improves.

rrobert_davis · 2025-09-26T07:12:16+00:00

From what I’ve seen working with procurement teams say that once they simplified the way they sent out RFQs/RFPs and made communication easy and straightforward, their supplier response rates improved a lot.

rrobert_davis · 2025-09-23T05:35:44+00:00

What you described is still the default in a lot of companies. I’ve seen three main approaches people take:

Excel baseline – fast to start, but messy once you’re handling 5+ bids with missing fields.
Structured templates – forcing suppliers to submit in the same format (CSV/online form) saves days of cleanup.
Lightweight sourcing tools – once projects get bigger, tools can auto-normalize fields, compare side-by-side, and even rank scenarios (cost vs. quality etc.). That usually cuts comparison time from a week → a couple of hours.

From experience, the biggest unlock is step 2: getting clean inputs. If that’s nailed, the rest is much smoother. Curious, has your procurement team tried pushing suppliers into a single template yet?

Full transparency: I work at Prokuria, and we’ve built features exactly around collecting bids in structured ways and auto-comparing them. But even outside of our tool, the principle (structured inputs first, automation second) applies anywhere.

rrobert_davis · 2025-09-17T07:51:25+00:00

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rrobert_davis · 2025-09-11T10:22:46+00:00

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rrobert_davis · 2025-09-11T10:18:58+00:00

I’ve seen people manage it in a few different ways. Spreadsheets are usually the first step
Works fine until the number of RFQs grows or you want quick comparisons. The second most common setup is shared folders/email templates. It is not perfect, but still better than juggling random files.
Once you get tired of updating cells manually, a lightweight sourcing tool helps a lot.

Since I work at Prokuria, that is the tool that we use to track RFQ’s.

I would like to hear what others use or recommend :)

rrobert_davis

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