The vendors on the long list should provide you information to let you judge them against your selection criteria; that is the purpose of a request for information. It's still the first round in the selection process for buying software, you probably have more than one supplier on your list (I hope, otherwise you are now ready!), so you cannot go too much in depth at this stage. That's ok, we are just requesting information.

The package (Request for Information – RFI) you will send to the chosen ones contains three parts:

• The Invitation
• The Information Sheet
• The Questionnaire

In this section we will provide samples of such a Request for Information.

7.1 The Invitation

The Invitation is actually just the accompanying letter. You explain why you send the RFI (request for information) and that you want answers and brochures back. In exchange, they'll have a change of doing business with you…

Make sure you cover at least the following aspects:

• Who are you?
• From what company?
• What does your company do?
• What is your function within your company?
• What kind of system are you looking for?
• Describe the process: now Request for Information (RFI), then evaluation, followed by short list with Request for Proposal.
• Provide the timelines of the selection process
• Explain the Information Package and the Questionnaire
• When should answers be back? By who? Where? How?
• Who's the contact for more information?
• Thanks for the corporation.

Dear Sir

WinDings Ltd. is an independent business unit of Acme Corporation, a leading maker of little things in Europe. WinDings makes products like nose flutes, feet whistles and the famous Non Static Doormat.

We are currently looking for a information system which supports the booking and billing of our orders. For this, we are approaching a couple of suppliers, from which we want to select the system best suited for our purposes. You are one of these suppliers.

We kindly ask you to answer to accompanying questionnaire, and return it including some brochures about your product, to us before December 12^th 2010. Based upon the responses we will make a selection of companies for the next step in our project, a demo of the actual system and a request for proposal.

If you have any questions, you can contact Bas de Baar at +1 800-THE-MAN. He is the project leader for our selection process.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Best regards,

B.Eetlejuice

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2007 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Software Selection.