RFPs Are Not a Good Way to Procure Print Software

At some point, businesses of a certain size decided that putting out a formal request for proposal (RFP) was a good method for making software decisions. This was a long time ago; a lot has changed about software and it’s time for the methods we deploy to make software decisions to change as well.

Here are my top three reasons why I hate RFPs for purchasing print software:

RFPs are “prescriptive solutions” instead of “descriptive challenges to be solved.”

You are a printer, you are not a software company. You don’t know the best way to solve your challenges with software. You are an expert at your print business’ challenges. You are not an expert on how they should be solved with software. Do not sit down and write an exhaustive list of features (they are a list of solutions) as your RFP. What you need to do is communicate to potential print software vendors your well-thought-out challenges. Implementation of most print software solutions is a terrible experience due to the sales process. Printers list hundreds of features in their RFP, winning vendor says "yes" to all of them. Printer assumes “yes” to any feature means that their challenges are going to be solved exactly how they assume with little or no work from them or customization of the vendor’s solution. Reality check. Bank account check. Implementation just slips by another year.

This outcome is common because the RFP actually prevents the vendor from understanding the printer. The RFP tries to “codify” the solution rather than provide each prospective vendor with a clear understanding of the business challenges so that a printer can get each vendor’s unique approach to solving these challenges. For example, if you have a long list of exact custom reports you want from a Print MIS, what you’ve done is prescribe a method for gaining business intelligence from your Print MIS. What if the vendor has a better way for solving your business intelligence challenge (e.g. configurable database query builder, integrated B.I. tool, etc.)? You are prescribing a solution that isn’t even the best solution based on your limited knowledge. How could we continue to think this will help us make better procurement decisions?

RFPs rarely communicate priorities.

Everything about your business is prioritized. We have limited resources, so we need to deploy them to get the most important things done first. Yet, when we write an RFP we typically ask the prospective vendors to answer yes/no to feature-related questions as if they are all equally important. I would prefer to see this kind of language in an RFP:

The following are our top five business challenges. If you do not have a clear solution for each one of these, please take yourself out of consideration for this RFP as we will not consider any vendor that doesn’t have a solid solution for each of these issues.

An example business challenge might be:

We have a legacy Print MIS we need to replace, but we want to keep our fulfillment system (X) and integrate with our current web-to-print solution (Y). Please describe how your system would integrate into these two systems. What resources would we be required to have? How would the maintenance of these integrations be supported?

That is a brief description of a challenge; let the vendors describe how they would solve it.

You have to make purchasing decisions based on what’s most important to you. This is the primary way you maintain control of the sales process. If you don’t do this, you will be driven by sales trained to highlight the features that put their solution in the best light against the competitors. Be careful here, because I’ve seen lots of printers make decisions about software based on features that weren’t important to their business until they saw them in the sales process. In one case, I saw a very large printer choose a vendor who sold them on where they thought they should take their business (which happened to be exactly where their product was better than all the competition). It was a compelling sales job and a very expensive mistake, because the organization didn’t have any ability to sell that vision to their customers. So they wasted two plus years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on software that allowed them to do very complex things that their sales team couldn’t sell and their customers didn’t understand. Ouch.

Almost all of your time in the procurement process should be spent on your top three to five priorities. This is you driving the RFP process. It takes active driving because if vendors are weak at any one of your top five, they will try to avoid those topics and move you to talk about where they are strong. What you’re looking for is a “fit” between your top five challenges and the vendor’s strengths. You can never get to this via a long feature list that makes all vendors seem the same.

Is your software solution already working for other companies like mine?

There is nothing better than knowing that another printer who is similar to you has been using the software successfully before you buy it. This is an obvious statement, but it takes work to get to real answers and real confidence.

Reference customers are of course filtered by the vendor. The list of reference customers often has at least one thing in common: the amount of times they’ve been taken out to dinner, to baseball games (hockey if you're Canadian), etc. Think “friends and family” of the vendor. This list is not useless but it’s also not enough. The reference list is where the software is working for the company, and the people have agreed to be references. You will get some good information from these folks. You also need to get other references as well.

Software references (in particular) for a Print MIS solution is a landmine. I have met only a handful of printers that are more than 50% positive about their Print MIS. It is not a happy topic for most printers. It is not all the vendor's fault. It is a lot of work to make a Print MIS truly sing for your business. Most printers haven’t done it, have no intention of doing it, don’t understand that it’s even their work to do. So your inquiries into references for Print MIS solutions will range from “I’m currently suing the vendor,” to “I’m OK with the solution but I’ve been taking high blood pressure medicine since the implementation.”

Take the glowing reviews from the list of “approved” references with a grain of salt. Take the complaining from unhappy customers with another grain of salt. If someone is really complaining, ask this question: “Can I talk to your Print MIS administrator?” Chances are their answer will be “we don’t have one.” Exhibit A for why the implementation didn’t go well. There is no perfect solution. There is no perfect vendor. You will have to do way more work than you think, but you have to go talk to printers about their positive and negative interactions with the vendor. While you’re talking to them, ask what they would have done differently during implementation. This is a great indicator if the printer understands that a successful implementation is just as much about their team’s effort as it is about the vendor’s efforts.

RFPs aren’t a good way to procure software. Spend more time getting to know other printers who are already using the software. Spend more time defining the business challenges you want the software to solve. Spend more time teaching the vendors about your business, then let them describe how they would solve your top priorities. This will not only allow you to make a better procurement decision,but it will also set the implementation team up for success. The vendor actually learns a little about you in the sales process, and you learn about how their software would solve your most important business challenges.