What is an RFP?

What does RFP stand for?

RFP stands for request for proposal. In business, an RFP is the document a buyer sends to potential suppliers to describe what it needs, the conditions of the future contract and how it will choose, and to ask each supplier for a proposal: how it would meet the need, with what team, timeline and price. The buyer then evaluates the proposals against criteria it published in advance.

The US Federal Acquisition Regulation gives a compact legal definition of the role. Under FAR 15.203, requests for proposals are used in negotiated acquisitions “to communicate Government requirements to prospective contractors and to solicit proposals.” The same rule says what a competitive RFP must describe at a minimum: the requirement, the anticipated terms and conditions, the information each proposal must contain, and the evaluation factors and their relative importance. Those four elements are a useful checklist for any RFP, public or private.

When do you use an RFP?

An RFP is the right request when the buyer knows the outcome it needs but not the best way to achieve it, and when suppliers’ answers will differ in substance, not only in price. Software, consulting, outsourced services, construction design and complex equipment are typical cases. The RFP lets suppliers propose different solutions and lets the buyer weigh quality, risk and price together.

Two other requests sit beside it. A request for information (RFI) gathers market information before the buyer decides what to buy; under the FAR, responses to an RFI “are not offers” and cannot form a contract. A request for quotation (RFQ) asks for prices on a need already specified in detail, where the lowest compliant price usually wins. A side-by-side comparison of the three, with when to use each, and a guide to the RFQ itself, its process and its documents, are in preparation.

What goes into an RFP?

An RFP has to give suppliers enough to write comparable proposals and give the evaluators a basis to score them. Whatever the template, the same sections appear. The outline below is a practical structure for a private-sector RFP; the right-hand column shows where the same content sits in the uniform contract format of FAR 15.204-1, which US federal solicitations follow.

Sample RFPs and examples found online are useful for wording, but the requirements section has to be written for the need at hand. It is a common point of failure: requirements copied from another project, or written as a supplier’s feature list, attract proposals that answer the document rather than the problem.

How long does an RFP take?

An RFP sits inside the go-to-market step of strategic sourcing. It runs from planning and market research through writing and issuing the request, answering suppliers’ questions and receiving proposals, to evaluation, award and contract. A dedicated guide to the RFP process, with the roles and documents of each stage, is in preparation.

Timelines are where private and public RFPs differ most. Public buyers must leave suppliers a minimum time to respond; the table shows the main reference points under US and EU rules.

How are RFP responses evaluated?

RFP evaluation compares proposals against the criteria published in the RFP, and only those. Two approaches dominate. In a trade-off, the buyer may award to a supplier that is not the cheapest if its proposal is worth the difference; FAR 15.101-1 requires the solicitation to state whether non-price factors, combined, are significantly more important than, about equal to, or significantly less important than price. In a lowest price technically acceptable approach, FAR 15.101-2, every proposal is checked against minimum requirements and the cheapest acceptable one wins, with no trade-off allowed.

EU public buyers use a related concept. Article 67 of Directive 2014/24/EU requires contracts to be awarded to the most economically advantageous tender, identified on the basis of price or cost, for example with life-cycle costing, and it may include the best price-quality ratio. Private buyers are free to choose their method, and most use weighted scoring.

The worked example below shows weighted scoring on three fictional proposals. Technical quality weighs 50%, price 30% and implementation 20%. Technical and implementation are scored from 0 to 10 by the panel; the price score is the lowest price divided by the supplier’s price, times 10.

The example also shows why weights must be fixed before proposals are opened. With price at 60% and technical quality at 20%, Supplier B would win; changing the weights after seeing the prices changes the winner, which is the main reason public rules require criteria and their importance to be published in the RFP.

What is an RFP response?

An RFP response, or proposal, is the supplier’s answer to the request: a document, often with a price workbook and forms, that follows the RFP’s instructions and shows how the supplier meets each requirement. For the buyer, the quality of responses depends largely on the RFP: clear instructions, a response format that mirrors the evaluation criteria and a fixed price structure make proposals easier to compare and harder to pad.

Suppliers who answer many RFPs maintain libraries of approved answers and use proposal software to assemble them. Searches for “RFP software” often mean these supplier-side tools rather than the buyer’s e-sourcing system; the distinction matters when choosing a product, and it will be covered in a dedicated guide to RFP software.

Can AI write or evaluate an RFP?

AI tools are now used on both sides of an RFP. Buyers use language models to draft requirement sections from notes, check an RFP for missing or contradictory instructions, and summarise long proposals against the criteria. Suppliers use them to draft answers from their content libraries. Both uses save drafting time and both need review: a model can produce a plausible requirement that nobody in the organisation needs, or a summary that misses a qualification hidden in an annex.

For evaluation, the accountability stays with the panel. Public rules require the award to follow the published criteria, and a score has to be explained to an unsuccessful supplier who asks; an AI-generated comparison is an input to that explanation, not a substitute for it.

How are RFPs run electronically?

Many RFPs now run on an e-sourcing or e-tendering platform: the RFP is published there, suppliers ask questions and submit proposals through it, and evaluators score in it. FAR 15.203(c) explicitly allows electronic commerce to issue RFPs and receive proposals, as long as the RFP states the methods suppliers may use, and in the EU electronic submission has been the rule for procedures under Directive 2014/24/EU since October 2018 at the latest. The e-procurement guide explains where e-sourcing sits among the other procurement systems.

The platform adds what email cannot: a sealed deadline, an audit trail of every question and answer, equal information for all suppliers and scoring records. That is why even private buyers with simple RFPs move to a tool once several people evaluate or several RFPs run at once.