RFPs have always been time-consuming and confusing, but will an online solution make the job any easier to bear, asks Bob Papworth
Life throws up far more questions than answers. Why do we refer to the police as "the old bill"? Why is saying "boo" to a goose deemed to be a measure of bravado? Has anyone ever established, with any degree of mathematical certainty, that cats have precisely nine lives? In travel, the questions also still come. Why is the seat-belt on aircraft adjusted to fit someone with a ten-inch waist? Why do hotel bedside switches never turn off the lights you want? And why, oh why, does the industry bother with RFPs?
Requests for proposals (RFPs), like the person inevitably sitting next to you on every long-haul flight, are far too big, ask far too many questions, and once they've gone, you never see them again.
To travel cynics, RFP translates as "reams of fruitless paperwork".
Jenny Prescott, director of sales, Europe, for HRG, highlights the sheer scale of the problem. In 2007, she says, HRG received "well in excess of 100 major RFPs" - and that's just in the UK, one of more than 100 countries where the corporate services provider is represented.
The smallest of those RFPs covered travel requirements in just one country, but the largest covered 68.
"Just imagine," says Prescott, with more than a hint of exasperation in her voice, "receiving an Excel spreadsheet with 250 questions, covering 68 countries."
To be fair, it is something that has been occupying the minds of buyer and supplier organisations for some considerable time.
In the US, the National Business Travel Association's (NBTA) website includes five template RFPs (over there, the initials stand for "request for pricing") covering airlines, hotels, ground transportation, corporate cards and travel management companies.
Devised by NBTA volunteers and involving hundreds of hours of work, the templates "were designed specifically to bring a higher level of standardisation to the RFP process".
Laudable though that is, our own Institute of Travel Management (ITM) is currently taking a slightly different tack. It's one thing to have a table d'hôte menu of questions to ask, argues executive director Paul Tilstone, but quite another to know when - and even whether - to ask them.
"We have actually just been talking about the whole RFP issue within the ITM, and how we can extend and improve the RFP zone on our website, to turn it into something that hopefully helps streamline the whole process," he says.
One of the concepts currently under consideration is a template of 10 basic questions, inviting buyers to rate the services they receive - travel management company service levels, ease of use of self-booking tools, access to 24-hour emergency support, and so on and so forth.
"The idea - and we are only talking about it at the moment - is that buyers would send that data to us at the ITM, and we would then benchmark the answers to those questions," says Tilstone.
"So if, for example, you reckon your TMC warrants a score of 75 out of 100, you need something to compare that with. By using the ITM benchmarks, you could then establish that everyone else is getting 85 per cent service, and you need to have a strong word with your TMC.
"Equally, you might discover that everyone is getting less than 75 out of 100 and decide as a result that it's not worth going through an RFP process since you're already ahead of the game."
Longer term, the institute is looking to develop a system it has provisionally called a "benchmark cube", which would enable buyers to input similar "scores" for specific supplies.
"One side of the cube might be airline deals, another might be ground transportation costs, or four-star hotels in New York, Paris and London - again it would allow buyers to see whether the deals they already have in place are comparable with others out in the marketplace, and to then take a view on whether or not to go to the RFP stage.
Leaving aside the fact that a cube only has six sides - a benchmark icositetrahedron, as everyone knows, would have four times the capacity - the underlying strategy would appear to be one of RFP avoidance.
This is hardly surprising, given that 45 per cent of RFPs take between four and six months to process, with a significant few (eight per cent) taking up to a year to complete.
Given that most airline and hotel deals (59 per cent and 75 per cent respectively) are re-negotiated yearly - travel management company and hotel booking agency reviews tend to happen every three or four years - Tilstone is right to believe that there is an urgent need for streamlining.
The inefficiencies of the system don't stop there. Subsequent ITM research reveals that 60 per cent of suppliers feel that buyers don't paint a complete picture of their business needs when going out to tender.
No-one is suggesting that the buyers are in any way dishonest, but there is clearly a view that many RFP documents are fundamentally flawed in the first instance; suppliers are being asked to quote for one level of service, and then expected to provide a higher level.
Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to the e-RFP. In these allegedly eco-friendly times, "reams of fruitless paperwork" is about as politically incorrect as it gets, so an online procurement process ticks a lot of green boxes.
Ticking virtual boxes, however, brings other problems, as HRG's Jenny Prescott is only too keen to point out.
"Most e-procurement systems were designed to be for commodities," she complains. "They were designed for widgets, not services, and, from our point of view, inhibit creativity.
"RFPs for travel management services will require descriptive responses to open-ended questions - e-procurement doesn't lend itself to that.
Even the systems' typefaces and font sizes can turn out to be a bugbear - a straightforward, ready-to-hand response to more basic questions on one system may simply not fit on another.
Bidders want to use their own graphics, and cross-refer to them in the text of their responses, but if type-sizes vary, so does the pagination - the pretty pie-chart on page six in one font size may slip to page seven in another, creating all sorts of headaches for the hapless soul trying to make sense of the whole thing.
It doesn't stop there. Not all RFPs come in as Excel spreadsheets; some are Word documents, but then there are several different versions of Word, and not all of them are compatible with all graphics packages.
If that wasn't enough for Hogg's bid-writing teams to contend with, there are the e-procurement systems themselves. "There are seven or eight regular e-procurement systems, and they're all different - each has different specifications and limitations," Prescott says.
All of which should be horribly bad news for Roland Tanner, chief operating officer with Lanyon, which claims to be the world's leading independent provider of RFP technology to the travel industry. He is, however, unfazed.
"A lot of people don't understand them," he says of e-RFPs. "They would rather not do them, but on the other hand they are a source of business - and a growing source of business."
Lanyon, which recently consolidated its market leader position by acquiring RFP Express, is confident that it is on to a winner - and as far as the travel industry is concerned, its activities are so far restricted to hotel RFPs. Anything in the pipeline?
"Our plates are really full right now," says Tanner. We do have car rental customers and we do have airline customers, but these are non-RFP deals. The NBTA created a meetings module last year, which was a major step forward, and we are working on some possible developments in that area, but nothing immediate."
The Lanyon boss has good reason to feel smug. ITM research back in 2006 revealed that 33 per cent of all its members' hotel RFPs were conducted online. Ground transportation RFPs, by contrast, were almost entirely paper-based or "manual".
"The number of RFPs that we are processing is increasing year on year," Tanner says, so that 33 per cent may well be old news by now.
Key reasons, it would seem, are time and money. More than one-third of the ITM survey sample said that they had achieved estimated cost savings in excess of 10 per cent by going online, while Tanner says: "We have heard from customers who have saved up to 90 per cent in terms of time and cost."
Interestingly, although they appear in many ways to be coming from opposite sides of the debate, both Tanner and Prescott are adamant that no RFP, on- or offline, is a stand-alone deal-clincher.
"Relationships," says Tanner, "are still very important. Our e-RFPs will save you a lot of time and money, but it's only through personal relationships that you will get those really great deals."
Prescott insists that every RFP that comes into HRG has to stand up to all sorts of tests before the group will even bother to respond. Do they have the time and the people to do a good job? How good is the incumbent TMC - is it even worth taking them on? Is the requirement service-driven, or purely price-driven - either way, can HRG add real value?
The key question, however, is: "Can we provide a cultural fit?" In essence, do we already have, or can we develop, a working relationship?
RFPs - whether on paper or on screen - appear to be almost universally disliked, and yet the industry persists in finding new ways to re-invent an old problem, when Sir Cliff Richard has had the answer since 1979.
"It's so funny," he sang back then, "how we don't talk any more."
There's another of life's little mysteries. How did that song ever get to No 1?
