Every company has a number of stakeholders that in some way involved in the services you are outsourcing. From the human resources personnel that have direct contact with the transferees - to procurement, payroll and IT. Each stakeholder will have different goals that they expect their supplier to meet.

The first step of your RFP development phase should be to define the team members that will be most impacted by the services you are buying. A quick meeting with these stakeholders will identify the needs of each department and can bring to light any specific pain points being experienced in your current program. These conversations will be critical in helping you to identify the general criteria your selected supplier must meet in order to fully support all of your stakeholders' needs.

Your company has objectives. Your stakeholders have objectives. The employees that you are moving have their own objectives as well.

Trying to create a supplier evaluation model that ensures everyone's needs are met can feel like an impossible challenge. It can be frustrating reading through a multitude of supplier responses containing answers to hundreds of questions, when what you really want to know is, “Can this supplier help me meet everyone's goals?”

SIRVA recommends performing a complete stakeholder analysis before you begin to construct your RFP. Possibly the most effective model to help you do this is a weighted scorecard, as it will allow you to systemically apply values to each of your stakeholder objectives.

A collective analysis of the common objectives and weightings will help you to quickly determine the "must haves" of your program so that you can focus your request documents on these critical areas. It will additionally help you to assess supplier responses on a facts-based level once they are returned.

SIRVA can assist you in designing a stakeholder scorecard. We can provide you with topics of discussion or questionnaires to facilitate conversations with your key stakeholders to pinpoint their goals. Additionally, we can help you design response scorecards that will help you quickly evaluate your supplier responses and shortlist your candidates based on their ability to meet your objectives.

The type of supplier your company needs and the services you require are as unique as you are. The mobility industry is comprised of a great variety of outsourcing models – from global organizations that offer one-stop-shopping to local, real estate and moving franchises that primarily support certain regions. Each supplier will offer different capabilities, as well as a different style of support.

The last thing you want is to review 30 or more supplier responses to a full RFP, so it is important to refine your supplier candidate pool before you publish a formal request for proposal.

You can refine your candidate pool by conducting your own research into the size, scope, global footprint and service offerings of the various companies that are there. Alternately, you can have those 30+ suppliers do it for you!

Submitting a simple Request for Information (RFI) can shortlist your supplier pool quickly. We recommend use of an RFI that focuses on short, metrics-based answers that qualify the supplier's top line criteria, such as:

• Number of years doing business
• Number of supplier locations
• Average volume
• Scope of services offered
• Regional support if you need it

Contact us for a sample RFI document to help you refine your candidate pool.

• Providing as much information at the outset of your RFP process as possible will help:
• Reduce the cycle time of your response process, as it helps to eliminate follow up questions from your responding candidates
• Allow your candidate suppliers to identify potential areas where their unique services may improve your program
• Allow your candidate suppliers to offer recommendations on your program to improve your results
• Help you and your stakeholders better understand your historical performance so that it is easier to compare supplier offerings

Gather the following information at the start of your RFP development process as it will help you focus your goals regardless of the information you release to your candidate suppliers:

• Historical volume broken out by program / policy type
• Average home values
• Your typical move patterns – or most common home and host locations
• Historical amended rates (or number of homes sold to outside buyers when offering a guaranteed home sale program)
• Historical days on market for home sales
• Average number of homes taken into inventory
• Average direct home sale costs
• Average length of assignments for temporary domestic assignments or global expatriate programs

Your RFP questions should focus on fact-based, measurable inquiries wherever possible. When you're buying mobility management, you're buying a service. As such, it may seem difficult to quantify the criteria that will lead to achieving your program goals. But the fact is - anyone can put promises on paper. To determine if your candidate suppliers can really achieve what they say they can, you need to ask them for proof!

SIRVA can provide you with a list of sample questions designed to support the “What, When, and How Many” questions that will offer the strongest insight into your candidate suppliers' true abilities. For example, asking a question like: “What was your amended rate in Chicago, Illinois for the past three years?” can provide more substantial insight into a supplier's performance than asking, “How do you manage home sales.”

Fact-based questions ensure that you will get a quantitative answer. This allows you to compare performance across all suppliers. It also allows you to determine if the candidate supplier has the existing ability to track, monitor and report on the metrics that are critical to providing real proof of value for your mobility spend.

One of the greatest challenges faced by mobility services buyers is obtaining a clear picture on the actual cost of program ownership. Assessing the total costs of your mobility program and creating a fact-based annual budget is never as simple as just adding up fees and rebate options. The service fees that you are quoted typically make up only 3% of your actual relocation spend.

SIRVA always recommends that employers examine both price and performance when evaluating their supplier partner options. Your supplier's performance - and the performance they drive across the supply chain - has the strongest impact on your bottom line. To get a true understanding of your overall spend, your pricing proforma should evaluate both service fees and critical metrics for performance.

For example, when evaluating costs for a domestic home sale program, you may consider structuring your pricing proforma to consider:

• The supplier's amended rates
• Their average days in inventory;
• Their average sale fall through rates
• Average direct home marketing costs, etc.

Pricing comparison based on performance and fees:

	Supplier A Management Fees	Supplier A Amended Rate	Supplier A Extended Costs	Supplier B Management Fees	Supplier B Amended Rate	Supplier B Extended Costs
Traditional AVO	$2,000	88%	$2,000 x 88 homes = $176,000	$1,000	65%	$1,000 x 65 homes = $65,000
Inventory Sale	$8,000		$8,000 x 22 homes = $308,000	$6,500		$6,500 x 35 homes = $437,500
Total Annual Fees A:			$484,000	Total Annual Fees B:		$502,500

In the above example, while Supplier A's management fees were higher, their home sale performance was markedly better than Supplier B's. This single factor alone amounted to a savings of more than $18,000 in just one area of the client's program.

While this example illustrates the financial impact of just one performance measure within the home sale portion of a program, the analysis holds true across all relocation program components and for all direct costs – from temporary living to household goods. Cycle times, days on market and direct supplier costs will dramatically impact the bottom line of every employer's program. It is your supplier's ability to control these downstream costs that brings true value to your outsourcing relationship.

There are a number of options used by procurement to solicit RFP information from candidates. From standard Microsoft Word response documents to online purchasing systems, each model offers distinct advantages and disadvantages to the user. Before deciding how your RFP will be published, distributed and responded to, consider the pros and cons of the following venues:

• Freeform Word Document: The standard Q&A model provides your respondents the most flexibility. It allows for easy production for hard copy responses and is typically the simplest model to read. Unfortunately, the Word format also gives your candidates a lot of room to craft extremely lengthy answers that may be irrelevant to the questions asked. Careful crafting of your RFP questions will help to alleviate this result. However, an additional concern with the Word document is that it lends itself to the need to correlate and evaluate data manually. Depending upon the number of respondents in your candidate pool, this may be a concern.
   
• Spreadsheet (Excel) Formats: Spreadsheet formats provide your team with inherent functionality for collecting, correlating and comparing candidate responses. Spreadsheet formats also allow for innate limitations to the lengths of responses that can be provided. This can sometimes be a concern if questions are not designed to ask for very specific answers. Additionally, response documents are often difficult to read in this model and do not easily produce hard copies.
   
• Online Bidding Applications: A large number of companies now conduct all procurement activities through online bidding applications (such as Ariba, X and others). While costly, many of the online applications provide ideal models for collecting and comparing the data submitted. When using these applications, it is important to pay careful attention to how the questions in your RFP are positioned. Most online applications allow you to customize response fields, including format, length, etc. Each question in your RFP document must be reviewed carefully to ensure that it is designed to for the supplier to answer in an appropriate manner, with an appropriate amount of information. The need to vet your RFP document carefully and design the response tool to meet your needs may extend the cycle time of your purchasing project.

Establishing an appropriate timeline for the entire supplier review process is a critical step. While you want to be certain you're fully evaluating all of your choices, you don't want it to take a year! Some standard activities to consider when creating your supplier evaluation schedule include:

• Provide enough room in your "request-to-submission" timeline to accommodate a questions and answers period. Your suppliers will ask questions. You want to allow your team enough room in the schedule to answer them - without having to push back your submission date from the start.
   
• Base your request-to-submission timeline on the length of your document. Your goal is to use this tool to narrow down your candidate pool. As such, you will get a better, more comprehensive picture of your supplier's abilities if you provide adequate time to respond. The typical turn time for a short RFP is two weeks. Longer, more involved documents with expanded scopes of work can require three to four weeks to achieve a customized response.
   
• Plan ahead for best and final presentations, site visits and follow up information. You will likely have more questions once you receive the supplier responses. However, to expedite cycle times, many companies distribute a tentative agenda for best and final presentations / site visits with the RFP request. This allows the supplier to plan ahead and build presentation materials during the same time they are responding to the RFP. As such, you can move to the next round of your evaluation process faster.