Creating Requests for Information

A Request for Information (RFI) is an event type used to collect information from suppliers.

RFI events aren't competitive, and participant responses are never shown to other participants.

RFIs can be open for responses for an arbitrary amount of time (several days or weeks), allowing participants to log in and respond at their convenience since they’re noncompetitive.

Use a Request for Information (RFI) to send questions to participants, gather participant feedback, and qualify participants based on their responses.

RFI events are intended to gather noncompetitive data, information, comments, or reactions from potential participants.

RFIs typically don't solicit pricing information, instead, RFIs usually precede other events (RFPs or auctions) that include price.

Here are some common uses of RFIs:

• Consolidate or narrow the supply base by identifying which suppliers are most likely able to provide the required goods or services.
• Learn supplier capabilities, while suppliers learn to understand your needs.
• Provide answers before the bidding process.
• Used to qualify suppliers before bidding.
• Let suppliers market their qualifications:
  • Supplier capabilities
  • Budgetary information
  • Product research
  • Hardware/Software strategy
  • Implementation strategy

For a demonstration of creating RFIs within guided sourcing, watch this video.

Qualify suppliers for RFP or Auction:

An RFI can also be used as the qualifying round of a longer sourcing process. In the RFI step, you collect information about participants for the purpose of selecting a few of them to invite to follow-on events such as RFPs or auctions. You can reuse the information from an RFI in another, follow-on event. Full projects can serve as a container for multistage event scenarios.

Soliciting proposals:

An RFI can be used alone to solicit proposals from participants. Although awarding RFIs are uncommon, project owners can award business based on the results of an RFI.

SAP Ariba provides one, standard Request for Information - Guided Sourcing Template.

When you use this template to create an RFI, the scoring feature is enabled, participant responses aren’t shown to other participants and there's no option to show participant responses to other participants.

Traditionally, a collection of RFI templates isn’t required. The default settings within the standard template meet most customer requirements as RFIs don't require complex rule or pricing strategies.