Situation
Resulting from significant growth through acquisition, a national qualifying and certifying education company was suffering from a lack of consistency in the technology that supports their product. They currently support multiple Learning Management, Content Management and eCommerce platforms. While reaching the final step to publishing an RFP, the company realized the vendor populations for the three different technologies they wanted to evaluate were enormous. The team understood that not only did they lack the expertise, but were also going to have invest significant time and expense to narrow the vendor pool to identify the 4-6 vendors that they wanted to invite to participate.
Solution
BusinessForward solutions architects provided a software selection solution. At this point the customer was focused on the RFP step of the solution and engaged our team in a four week initiative to:
- Identify and prioritize requirements to help narrow the field
- Conduct a market scan that eliminates 80% of the field
- Conduct a deeper dive into the remaining vendors
- Select 4-6 vendors for each of the three different technology solutions to recommend taking to an RFP
Results
BusinessForward was able to consolidate the functionality of two of the three original technologies into an RFP for a single platform, saving the customer time and cost. As a result the client experienced a streamlined RFP process. In addition, we:
- Documented and prioritized over 520 business requirements to help analyze the fields
- Analyzed over 150 vendors
- Selected 8 vendors to take through two separate RFPs
- Reduced the time required to take an RFP to the street by almost 70% (quote from customer: “the last time we did this it was over 3 months until we were at this point” the project took 4 weeks”)
Our customer selected a technology that met over 90% of their key business requirements