How a request works
Take a multi-tenant office building whose janitorial contract runs out at the end of the quarter. You have the insurance article that was attached to it, a decent description of the work from the last time this went out, and no wish to spend three weeks on the phone. That is the whole of what a request needs.
What follows is that job, from the address to the award, with nothing invented for the sake of the example.
The walk, in order
Six steps, and the reason there are only six is that the platform already holds the paperwork the other steps used to be about.
The address and the scope
Cleaning is priced off the building rather than off ground, so an address is enough and nothing has to be drawn before the request can go out.
One address, one request. It is what the file is opened under and what a company reads first, because half of whether a job is worth answering is where it is.
The example calls for porter & janitorial, and naming it decides who sees the request. Only companies verified for that trade are shown one, and each of them was read against that trade's own rulebook first.
What you want done and how often. The specification your predecessor wrote is usually better than anything a form would produce, so it goes in as it stands.
The request prints the date on its own face, so nobody is guessing whether it is still open and nobody is phoning to ask.
The limits travel
Type each line of the insurance article once, against the trade it governs. From then on it is what a company is measured against before it can answer, and it is printed inside the request so nobody prices work they were never eligible for. Nothing is re-keyed per request, and no figure is chosen for you.
Whose number it is
You set the coverage limits you require, often the number your own insurer or lender asks for. A vendor whose recorded coverage falls below one of them cannot propose on your work until it is raised.
On the example building that means the janitorial minimums out of the outgoing contract, marked required where the article treats them as conditions and preferred where it does not. A company short of a required line sees the difference in dollars before it writes anything.
Who sees it
Publishing puts the request in front of companies whose insurance and credentials for that trade have already been read. Your phone number and your email address stay off it, which is the difference between a week of answers and a week of calls.
Printed on the face of every request
Issued through VendoRFP. Vendors send their proposals back on this site. No phone number or email address is published with this RFP.
The document prints and downloads, so the copy in your owner’s file and the copy a company prices from are the same sheet.
What comes back
Each company prices the lines you asked for and states how often it would attend. Every answer sits on one screen at the price the company wrote, so the differences you find are the ones you asked about.
Every answer
The scope you wrote comes back costed against itself, so two sheets can be laid side by side without translating one into the other first.
Every company
Clearing your minimums was the condition of writing to you, so the comparison at the end is between companies you could actually sign rather than between a price and a problem.
The award and the record
The request, the answers, the one you awarded and the contract that followed stay together under the building. Visits land in the same file with the photographs taken on the night. Invoices arrive with their own numbers and their own standing.
What leaves the platform when you ask
Pick a date range and take the period away in whichever of these your accountant asked for. Each file is written here, so none of them waits on an account with anybody else.
A request is a document rather than a broadcast, and most of the work in writing one has already happened by the time a building team sits down to do it.
Janitorial and day porterBuilding engineeringThe insurance exhibit