vendor selection – Workforce

Workforce.com has a steady flow of requests for proposal (RFP) from companies looking for a new workforce management software solution. So we decided to help make the process even easier by offering a complete workforce management RFP template that can easily be edited and used for finding the right vendor for your organization.

Parts of this template are specific to workforce management systems, but it can also be adjusted for any type of software search.

This process is tough for companies seeking new software, but it can also be long and complicated for the solution providers. The key to making it a smooth process for all parties involved and shortening the time spent trying to cut through the clutter is to make the initial RFP as simple and direct as possible without leaving any important details out.

Below is a shortened version of what we included in the template, but we are also providing the full template available for download and use here: Workforce Management Software RFP Template

Your workforce management RFP template should include the following:

Background and current process

Give the vendors a description of your company mission, the business challenge you are trying to solve with a new software vendor, and what is and is not working about your current process if applicable.

Submission instructions

Be sure to include key dates, submission requirements, and contact information early on. A vendor will likely come back to this over and over as they prepare their response, so it’s efficient to keep the top priority information front and center.

General terms and conditions

This is never the fun part, but it’s important to make your liability and expectations clear. If you have standard legal language, include as much as you can here to cover yourself.

Desired business outcomes and stakeholders to consider

Listing a precise business outcome and how it will be measured will help vendors speak directly to what matters to you most. Also providing a list of stakeholders and their titles allows the vendor to help you with change management and upselling the solution to all your colleagues involved with this project.

How will you help us achieve this outcome? (character count limit)

This question can help create an executive summary of each vendor’s solution for you to help speed up the selection process. Including a character count will make it more manageable so that the vendors stick to their high-level selling points instead of rehashing all of their features to you again.

Identify current solution and what you want to be different in the next provider

This is an important point if you’re looking to replace an existing solution. You’ll want to include any required software integrations, hardware requirements, and unique needs to your workforce or locations.

Required integrations

All you need here is a simple, straightforward list of payroll software, HCM software, and other relevant software for vendors to use to self-qualify themselves in or out quickly.

Also read: A technology integration is an intervention to dissolve common payroll errors

Bidder qualifications

If you have any qualifications for the type of company you want to work with, include that here. Do they need to have experience operating in certain countries? Do they need to be a certain size? Do they need any specific certifications? Is there anything unique about your billing process that needs to be observed?

Feature requirements

This is where you put your giant wish list. Be as detailed as possible and just use an excel worksheet or Google spreadsheet to keep track of the answers. This can be the most tedious part, but it’s your chance to involve the other stakeholders so that you don’t get major objections on the vendors late in the game.

Ask vendors to provide a screenshot of the platform whenever possible

This is a quick way to assess the user experience. If a vendor checks all the boxes but their system is outdated and hard to navigate, that will make your job of user adoption that much more difficult.

Links to reviews

You can’t just take a vendor’s word for how things will go once you choose their solution. You can always ask for referrals, but a good first step is to see what type of public reviews they have. Trusted industry analyst firms like Gartner and software review sites are helpful but don’t forget to also search for frontline worker reviews in the App store or Google Play store. Sometimes they tell a different story.

Also read: COVID-19 causes Radial’s 25,000 seasonal hires to practice safe shipping

Links to case studies

This is your chance to directly ask about their experience and success with companies like yours.

RFP timeline and project timeline

Set expectations with a chart like the one below. This will cut down on unwanted status questions from all the vendors you contact as you work through your process.

Action Item	Date
Issuance of RFP	[Issue date]
Questions about RFP due	[Question deadline]
Response to questions distributed	[Answers distributed]
Response to RFP due	[Closing date]
Respondents notified regarding participation in Phase 2	[Phase 2 notify date]
Presentations at [company location]	[Demo date]
Selected vendor notified	[Award notify date]

Implementation schedule or time to value of your solution

You need to know whether implementation of this new software will take a month or a year. This is where you can require vendors to give you a high level view of what their implementation process will look like to see if it matches your organization’s culture. You should also ask if they have an estimate on time to value. If their solution promises to provide you time or cost savings, how long might it be before you start to see that value promise realized?

Also read: Workforce management tools to help address modern workplace challenges

Security and risk

This is often discussed later in the process, but adding it in the RFP will save you from getting your hopes up about a solution that will be rejected by your IT team later.

Pricing

You can leave this open ended if you like, since there is always room for negotiation. But if you want a specific breakdown of the pricing based on your use case, it’s faster to just provide that info upfront.

Proposal evaluation criteria

This should differ based on a company’s unique needs, but the following is a good sample of what to keep in mind:

Product features
Company strength and maturing
Technical architecture
Services
Cost of ownership

This template was supplied by Workforce.com. To learn more about our product, please click on the product tab in our navigation menu.

For organizations to choose the right workforce technology partners for their unique needs, the process isn’t quick and simple.

Workforce experts explained the steps organizations can take to choose the best option for themselves.

Also read: How technology can help your employee engagement strategy

Taking the initial steps to finding your workforce technology partner

To find the right workforce technology partners, the first step organizations must take is to define and identify their business requirements, said Karen Piercy, a partner in Mercer’s Philadelphia office. Also, they should define what the key user experience requirements are:

How will users interact with it?
Is it mobile enough?
Will HR be able to adapt to it?

Another important factor is to consider the organization’s unique needs. When a company puts together its extensive list of requirements, generally speaking the large vendor solutions will already cover around 80 percent of them, Piercy said. Rather than focusing too much on these standard requirements, companies should spend more time considering their unique needs for their business and situation.

“Carve out the critical things that are somewhat different and figure out how each solution will meet those needs. That will really help separate the marketplace,” she said.

Another area to consider is the service and support aspect of the vendor solution, she added. How does the vendor work with the organization on an ongoing basis after the partnership has been made? How do they handle problems, and how much do they let customers be involved in new technology or new functionalities that they’re in need of?

Consider your unique needs

Enterprises should go after partners that can accelerate their business goals, said Chris Bruce, co-founder and managing director of Thomsons Online Benefits.

According to Thomsons’ research, 49 percent of organizations with fully centralized HR operations exceed their employee engagement targets. Meanwhile, only 33 percent of firms that have not fully centralized their HR operations have seen the same result.

“By working with partners that can help businesses meet or exceed their goals, whatever they may be, they will be better positioned to thrive,” Bruce said.

Common software customer concerns

Most HR professionals are not intimately familiar with all the HR solutions available, Piercy said. There’s a lot of ongoing change in the marketplace including mergers, acquisitions and new technologies, and HR needs someone who understands what’s going on in the industry.

Experts can help HR prioritize how they’ll evaluate vendors on everything from functionalities and features to user experience, she said.

“Companies often list a whole lot of requirements, and consultants know that 80 percent of them are standard functionality. So we don’t need to focus as much on that. It’s finding that 20 percent that are the things that not all technologies do well or that they might do very differently,” she added. “That role in helping pull out that 20 percent is very valuable, and helping them prioritize how they’ll evaluate the vendor.”

Questions for companies to consider include: What’s important to me? Is it mostly about user experience? Is it mostly about features and functionality? What’s the balance between these things for me? From there, these experts can help evaluate what vendors meet these needs and this balance the best.

While this is a best practice, many companies do not make decisions this way. The Workforce Business Intelligence Board’s “2020 HR State of the Industry Survey,” developed by Workforce.com’s research team, asked 809 survey respondents what their top three most important factors are for choosing a workforce management technology vendor. Unsurprisingly, 32.5 percent of respondents put “cost” in their top three. On the other hand, only 19.4 percent chose “ability to customize for our business needs.”

Experts can also help organizations compare costs for different vendors, Piercy said. Each vendor prices differently, which makes apple-to-apple comparisons more difficult, and certain experts can peel back these pricing models for the closest cost comparison possible.

The longevity of the selection process

Organizations should expect the vendor selection process to take at least two to three months, Piercy said. “You don’t want to short-cut a lot of that process,” she said. “Also, once you’ve picked the technology, you need an implementation partner, so there’s another round of selection right there.”

She advises that organizations start looking six months in advance and stay on task.

A lot of organizations know how early they need to start, but where they falter is they start to lag after that initial start date, she said. Then suddenly they realize they’re going to have to rush the process in order to get everything done on time.

Consider total cost of ownership

Once you have decided on the top vendor choices, that next step is to build the business case for leadership.

While getting that apples-to-apples cost comparison is important, leadership needs more cost information before they make the vendor selection. They also want the total cost of ownership of the technology, Piercy said.

“Leadership is going to need to know the total cost of owning the technology. What’s the business case or ROI involved in that?”

Tag: vendor selection

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