How can i document type sign rfp alaska
good good morning again sorry about the technical difficulty there so many things going on we're gonna get started here this morning to talk about requests for proposals now this is one of those things that we have to master in order to be strategic with our supply chain being able to get the requirement to folks so that your vendors can give you a good proposal so they can give you the right kind of cost estimate so they can bid properly on what you know you're asking for it's one of the most difficult things we do and so many times we do it ad hoc or we don't have a process or the process is different every single time so we're just not sure how to make it better so that's what we talk about today is give you an actual process to actually follow and implement in your shop so you can be more proficient and more strategic in your supply chain as I already went through the process you know how is everyone today just go ahead and just go into the chat box and say how is everyone today just go ahead and say great awesome it's raining and I don't want to be here but I'm stuck here whatever it is just go ahead and put that into the chat box and let us all know how you're doing great great awesome good good glad everyone's here then I have fun here and what we're going to talk about today is we're gonna talk about the first thing we're talking about is a requirement what is the perfect requirement that you have to know in order to properly source something that's what's the other two elements you have to know to get the perfect requirement about four different procurement strategies you can implement one is the RFP process but there's some other ones you may want to consider just so you can use the right tool based on whatever the requirement is how do you manage your RFPs the four elements for evaluating your proposals and one of my favorites is the different types of contracting you can use the reason I like to talk about this because so many people talk about the firm fixed price contract all the time and when they do they don't realize that there's so many different vehicles they can use out there we're going to talk about those today just to give you some other ideas so that you can create better contracts that are easier to manage for you and give you the results that you're looking for on a regular basis right now what I like to do that's another question is how many years of supply chain experience do you have just go ahead and put it in the chat box I'm not gonna use the poll again that seem to mess up things so I'm gonna stick it to the chat box so let me know how many years of experience you have in supply to six over 25 is awesome now 15 plus you can see we have a lot of experience in the room and you want to leverage that you want to make sure that we leverage our networking today and that even if you know going to our supply leaders Academy group on LinkedIn connect with each other join that group and start to find folks and connect with us because we have lots of experience and the one thing we can leverage more than anything is just what other people have done we don't need to relearn something or reinvent the wheel we can leverage what other people already done so get to know each other get to know each other through our networking it's all about being strategic not tactical you know many years ago when I say many years you've talked about in the last three to five years you know procurement was a function that was focused on tactics processing purchase order processing paperwork how fast can you do it but where is shifting we're moving to strategic support supply chain and we're making things happen today and we're being strategic in what we're doing and we're making it happen for the long term to do that ok so the next thing we're gonna talk about is me why am I in front of you what gives me the right to talk to you today and what I'd like to share with you is that you know I have over 20 years of experience in the Marine Corps doing many many different things that you can actually come in and take a look and realize that it's all about processes and how do you manage major military operations global operations all around the world whether it's all around the world or just simply in the United States or in your country in Africa and Pakistan it's about having relationships and having processes you can go and get this book here supply chain management by uniting on amazon.com it's only about four bucks you know downloaded if you don't want to spend the four bucks send me an email heck I'll send it a free copy to you for your you being spending some time here today to shoot me a quick email I'll send this right to you as a free copy that you can download and join there's some very key things that you can leverage and learn from this book to include planning leadership and using processes using the right tools and we'll talk a little bit about that later today as well our reality is that every day we're jumping through hoops trying to make things happen I understand and it's not easy what makes it challenging is with that we were learning from people that may or may not have our priorities in their mind that we have to consider in you our priorities as a way to leverage different processes to make it easy for them and makes it great for you and doing that and here's a mind map and what we're going to talk about today this is a mind map of the entire process today we're talking about the RFP process which is the fundamental understanding to do this RFP process one of the things that there's a vendor rationalization which we talked about a couple weeks ago and then once you award the contract you're gonna want to administrate that contract to make sure you're getting the value you expect from your vendors you know you're trying to think about all the different things that you want to get done and how once you award the contract are you stuck with the terms a lot of times possibly but then you can leverage certain things to get even more value from your customers and that's what we want to do and this is the actual detailed mind map you get today if you go into the material section on the webinar you can download this mind map and use it as a reference on your desktop and you can go through that and as you see this section over here this is all the different contracting it's type of vehicles you're going to use and can use and I want you to take a look at that and we'll go through this detail of it later but before that we're gonna go through and talk about the rf3 process and how it can help us be more successful and it starts with a requirement one of the most difficult things we do is get a good requirement a lot of times our customers say hey I just need a widget we say what kind of widget just give me the widget you know what I need make it happen but it's not what they really want we don't know what that is so one way we get the requirements we get a scope of work we get more specifications and we understand the performance and the design that we're looking for performance being how long it you know what is it that you know was it a 240 horsepower engine is it you know a factory they can produce 10,000 widgets you know that kind of thing and then the design is how does it look how does it feel you know a lot of us can relate to these sports cars that are out there the Lamborghini the Ferrari and the performance is out how fast it can go how quickly you can go from zero to 300 miles an hour you know and the design is how it looks you know how is it video how does it you know comfortable it is that's the design we're looking for so that's the different specifications that you're looking for in a requirement you want to make sure that it makes sense for you you know and then you get them that quality so you let people know exactly what the quality is that you want is it high quality is low qualities that this doesn't matter you need to let people know what the quality is because quality does cost money the higher the quality the more you're gonna pay and you don't want to over engineer something you just want to engineer just enough to be successful just enough to be successful and then once we understand the requirement let's go back a little step here let's go back to the requirement and understand the many different things so I want to make sure we understand this and be clear because once we have a good requirement then the rest becomes easy they only have a requirement we get with our customers we asked them what exactly are you looking for what's the scope of work what is the specification exactly what is it have them run that down for you have them maybe give you a sample if they can't that's even better what is the performance you need you know you need to be there on time you know what is every Friday at noon does it need to be super fast maybe super strong what is that performance you're looking for in the design what does it need to look like you know how does it need to look like for you so that it meets those specifications there and then what's the quality you're looking for you know is it really super high spec point zero zero zero one you have a just-in-time situation where once it comes off the truck is gonna go right on the line so that quality is absolutely essential or is it something that's kind of you know low quality high-volume doesn't really matter you just need to make sure you have it in stock so okay so once we understand the requirement we'll get with our customers and we understand that requirement the next thing I knew it's going to work with our vendors and now this is a process we talked about in the last webinar rationalizing our vendors in other words getting the right number of vendors with the right quality many times you hear about companies having vendors database of five thousand or ten thousand vendors but then we ask well how many do you really work with on a regular basis the number comes down to 200 or 300 so once a year twice a year you want to go through your vendor database and get your best vendors who have served you well who are with you for the long term and our strategic partner for you I can say we talked about that and last webinar and we're not gonna talk about it here but it's something that you want to go through to make sure that you have the best vendors the right makes the right number so you're not wasting a lot of time with vendors that aren't there for the strategic long-term there's many benefits for doing that and if you want to look at that webinar let me know what I do is I send you recording you can hear that and go through that on on your own so the next thing we'll talk about let's we have a requirement we know our vendors we're working with our vendors is what is procurement strategy you know RFP is one of it the first one we can talk about is just a simply an offer you call your vendors and say hey vendor I have this the requirement can you give me a quote and they give you a quote sometimes we do it with a phone call three or four vendors that we do well they give us a quote sometimes we do it with email you get a very basic offer and you know from there saying hey you know I want to buy this this thing is an informal bid or informal quote it's just something again it's not very strategic it's not very you know defined it's just something that's there to get something quick or something that you've done very often so you just need to call the vendor said hey I need a few widgets and they give you a few widgets and they know how to do that and you just have to go through a couple of them to make sure that you're getting the best price this bringing out brings up a great point when we go back to vendor rationalization a story like to share with you I had one of our students who went through our training a few years ago and he was working for a health fitness company and they went through and they were working with the same vendor for like ten to fifteen years and it was what cleaning solutions and what he did based on what he was learning in the CPS em training was he said you know I think we're gonna bid this out we're gonna do some competition to make sure we're getting the best price immediately immediately that vendor dropped their price by 20% so a couple points there one making sure you got the right vendors looking out for your best interest you always have competition more than one and then when you go through this process here just talking to them a little bit could result in some significant savings there and then you go through the RFI rfx type process RFI RP RFQ that's where it's more formal and we're going to talk about in detail today you go through that process and you send out a quote or send out a proposal you submit back to yourself vendors proposals evaluate those proposals they don't or the contract and that's what we're going to go and analyze our proposals and then we have the sealed bid mechanism this is a lot of times used in constructions or public type procurement where the vendors send to you a bid it's sealed in an envelope it shows up at a certain time a certain day and then at a certain date in time you open them and then lowest technically acceptable bid wins doing that so that's another technique that we can use to help get our requirements to our vendors to help make sure we're getting the right thing and then as we start to build it so we've gone through the requirements we've done our vendor rationalization now we've talked about different procurement strategies so based on the requirement talking to your internal customers figuring out what they need when they need it then you determine how you're going to manage your artbeat now we're going to assume here that they've decided they're going to go through a formal RFP process they're not going to follow any of those other things that we've talked about they're gonna go to the RFP process so how do you want to manage that first thing is coming up with instructions for your RFP that you're going to send to your vendors and say I need you to submit to me a proposal that addresses this requirement that requirement is based on what you know your customer told you what it is you got the perfect requirement with the specifications that we talked about earlier so you're going to give them very good instructions so you want them to give you a format remember when we're going through school and the teacher said I need you to submit a term paper at the end of the term and we always wondered how are they going to grade 50 term papers in one night to make sure I get my final grade so I can get my degree the next day the way they do that is they all have a consistent format and that's the same thing we're going to do with the RFP we're going to give them a consistent format so you know exactly where to go to find the information you're looking for that you're going to go in there and say okay this is the business this is their pricing this is their actual specification technical proposal we're gonna talk about the different parts is there we're gonna make sure it's very clear format and they follow those instructions because when we make sure they follow those instructions this is where they get to tell us how good a job they're doing if they're just in the first phases of our relationship and they're submitting to your proposal they're putting their best foot forward and if you give them very specific instructions about what you want and they don't follow it what does that tell you in regards to how it's gonna go in the future when you actually start paying them a little bit of money okay so think about that and then you come up the format make sure it's easy to find make sure your dates make sense you don't have them submit to submit a proposal on a holiday like today but you want them to submit a proposal today when it's a holiday weekend everyone's running out the door are you gonna give you quality falls are you really gonna do anything with it for the next three or four days so why not give them more time to put together better proposals okay make sure those terms and conditions are clear here we're talking about where you identified the quality you expect so they know exactly what they have to
do what their payment terms are so their net 60 or net 120 a couple times at 120 you know as a small business they need to know that because they need to price into their proposal that cost the money they need to finance that in other words once that's gonna take to deliver and once they deliver how long it's gonna take to get paid they got to have those financing charges in their proposal or they're gonna get themselves in a lot of trouble so you wanna make sure that's clear again this is in your RFP you're sending it out there so it's fair to everyone and then as you start to receive proposals in you want to maintain that confidence yeah you don't want to give a vendor an unfair advantage of what's going on and just to share with you a story here in Florida we're going through Brevard County they had two companies 18t which is a famous telecom communication company and Bright House cable network which is also another cable and network throughout the country here in the United States well they were both bidding on the internet contract for the local school board and here in Florida and many different states many different public procurement type processes there's public disclosure meaning the public has the right to listen to anything that's only on there well at this time they're in the final phases and these two vendors were doing their presentation to the school board for a decision well 18th he happened to go first and when they went first they actually you know said this is what we're gonna do and this how much it's gonna cost well bright house happened to be in the room now again this is okay because it's Sunshine Law it's the law but Bright House heard 18th he's price and then when bright house came in and did their proposal they just so happen to be 10% lower than 80 the result of course was that they awarded the contract a bright house because they were cheaper it was a procurement process there were public procurement so they awarded to the lowest technically acceptable offer and 18t said cry foul and they're now in litigation trying to figure this out you know again you want to make sure you maintain confidentiality of your vendors where even though you may have to abide by public procurement laws there's other things you need to do you get the best price otherwise vendors won't play they'll consider it they don't want to give away their their proprietary information their pricing and which will end up losing the business for them so they don't want to do that conflicts of interest first where someone it has the buying decision is on the has a relationship or personal ation with one of your vendors you want to make sure you disclose that whenever we have it that conflict of interest the bottom line is get it on the table get it on the table that somebody make the decision and once they make the decision we're able to you know avoid any conflicts of interest or appearances of impropriety we don't want any of that we want to make sure that whenever we make a decision both internally and externally I mean internally just because your private company this still applies as well as public companies where it's public disclosure you want to make sure all conflicts of interest are disclosed if for any reason you need to cancel this contract you want to make sure the vendors know as quickly as possible so that they can stop doing what they're doing they're spending time and resources building this RFP for you for any reason you're going to change that or cancel it they need to know as quickly as possible and here we have protests when we're talking about protests in the public procurement arena whenever you award the contract there's a point once the contras award where the other vendors are going to protest for any reason the contract wasn't awarded in a course with the criterias new contract that wasn't the original requirement but protests also apply to your private companies as well and the reason for that these your internal customers need to trust that you're going to make the best decision so if they already have a personal issue with a vendor or I've made a promise to a vendor and then that happens I know it does because you have engineers or other customers internally already working with the vendors developing information doing market research and those have things and then you end up going through a process like this and awards to a different vendor those people are going to protesser gonna say hey I thought you're gonna award it the business a and you're gonna say well here's our process and that's why you want to have a clear and transparent process like we're getting ready to talk about so that you can avoid these processes and so that you are always above board and not in any type of conflict of interest situation so whenever you make a decision people trust that decision to be correct okay now one of those questions I would ask is how long do you allow your vendors to respond to RFPs just go ahead and put in the chat box down there time box a did it three day is it 30 days 90 days on her 20 days does it depend you know just write down in the chat box how long you normally give a vendor to respond to any RFPs yeah ok 2 or 3 weeks 2 weeks ok good good good you know anything you have there you know 2 weeks ok 2 weeks just popping up pretty good and when you have a well-defined supply chain with vendors that know what your processes are two weeks is a sound number it makes sense it makes sense now it's for some more complicated requirements you may have 30 days and I've been involved in procurements I've taken up to six months and it's just because it was that complicated to do that so it depending on how much time you want to provide them it really depends upon the requirement and what's going to happen in doing that okay and that's the response time you want make sure you have a good response time now you've had your RFP out on the street so just walking the dog on this to make sure we're well along the process we've got our requirement we've met rationalize our vendor database we've gone through let's our procurement strategy which is an RFP we've managed our RFP we when we sent it out on the street we've gone through this process and then we're going to get ready to receive these proposals in and start to evaluate these proposals so we can get the best $1 or best value for our dollars what tools do you use to manage your supply chain if you can't just go right there into the chain into the chat box and just simply say that do you have any RP system an MRP system do you have some type of procurement system like Alibaba or any one these other Arriva source dog any one of these type of tools that you use or do you just use Excel spreadsheets and access databases you know sometimes it's just email and hard copies you know that's not it's not really modern but you know it's a reality is sometimes because these these systems can be very expensive and you don't want to spend time or spend time and money on systems that aren't really giving you the return on investment that you're looking for so you know you want to look at there and make sure that you using a good tool so yeah also got a RP forecasting excel you know everything and everything yeah and that's good too whatever tool you use we just want to get proficient with that tool and make sure that we use it and we exercise it the only thing I would offer is if you are in the email hardcopy arena or you're just doing email and hardcopy you may consider upgrading to something else Microsoft SharePoint is a great tool to use easy to manage cheap and affordable access databases excel again as they're also very affordable the key to is going to having very well defined processes that you can use all these tools with the only danger of having desktop applications versus cloud-based applications is that if something happens to your computer crashes or something happens to you and people can't get to that information then there's a risk of loss of data and you may want to consider that in your risk analysis in regards to what kind of systems you're going to use so looking at the evaluation tools you want to make sure that when you have an evaluation tool when I say tool here I'm not talking about a system I'm just talking about a process and that you can rank them from top to bottom grade them on how well they're going to meet your requirement and make sure is transparent so that you can avoid protests which we talked about a little bit earlier so that if somebody questions your decision for any reason they can go you can go into your tool and you can show them exactly why you made that decision and when you do that they've learned to trust you and give you the credibility you deserve as a procurement professional as a supply leader in doing that so that's why you want to make sure your tools allow you to rank grade and be transparent with your customers in doing that and then you want to make sure you control the process when I say control the process is that you are in absolute control from receiving the proposals from your vendors all the way to awarding the contract so you want to make sure they receive and Tamy manner and that everyone hits the due date and they're not late you may extend it but you need not going to accept any proposals that are late you'll make sure everything's receipt you're going to review it for correctness make sure that they followed your RFP instructions that if you told them no more than 50 pages then they don't have more than 50 pages if you told them 12-point font Times New Roman you tell them to separate technical operational and price all in separate sections and they didn't do that they're trying to win your business and they're not doing what you're telling to do now what think I'm doing is are paying them so you're going to review for correctness make sure that they're following your instructions you maintain your records so that you show people what you're doing and why you're doing it you're gonna request any information that you may need as well as respond to any questions you have from the vendors you're gonna control all this I want to be able to control this using the different tool we talked about before where you have your ERP system or your procurement system whatever system you have you're going to be able to do that with these tools be able to summarize it even with you know just the push of a button be able to push a report out that says this is exactly where we are in regards to our proposal process and summarize it so you can report to higher higher doesn't want to know all the details that you're waiting on five lenders all anyone knows okay poles on the street we received three proposals in we're expecting two more and we're gonna start a valuate on the state so you should be able to summarize that report really quickly and so people know what's going on in the RFP process not just hiring your management but also your internal customers because I know one of the things questions I always received was where are we on this what's going on what do we got to do you know to get things on back are we gonna make it on time actually I just went through that this week when I was requesting something myself like where's my stuff and they want to know that okay and we talked about responsiveness here it's just the same as we mentioned before where the vendors are responding to your RFP questions and that they're asking you right questions they're responding to what you're asking for and they're meaning the terms and conditions of your RFP did they meet your specification first and foremost are they going to give you what you asked for you asked for a requirement which has two parts the specification design and performance and did they meet that did they meet that do they have that first and foremost are they gonna need your quality requirements is that going to be something that you're gonna allow them to do okay you have your quality requirements are they going to meet your terms and conditions are they okay did they read them and that's one of the things you can do in your RFP process is even to submit a RFP to you they need to sign off stating that they will comply with your terms and conditions will you accept substitutes are they trying to give you a substitute you know here quality may be important for you so you're not going to accept any substitute or you're open because the requirements not is defined as other requirements you may be willing and willing to accept substitutes for the long you know that that may not your exact requirement but they're gonna meet the the need that you have to fill for your internal customers and once we've gone through and we've analyzed this to make sure the vendors are responding the way you want them to respond if not we're going to disregard throwout dispose of whatever it is that you think you need to do for your your responsiveness make sure that they responded to your RFP okay so then we're into your analysis we're gonna do in different parts technical analysis or operational analysis our price analysis and our cost analysis and finally our business analysis and let me go through these and step by step versus our technical requirement did they meet our technical requirement our specific specification specific process or service that we're looking for have they technically met the terms of our statement of work our specification have they technically done that did they explain it in a way that makes sense did they make it explain in a way that is understandable to your evaluation team then we're going to look at the operational capabilities of the company and as this company done this type of work in the past one of the things we would put in our RFPs is one of the criterias for a business even to compete is say they must have completed this or similar type of projects in the last three years that way you know not only do they have the type of experience you're looking for but they have current experience as technology changes you want to make sure that these people are involved and you know have the capability to meet your needs and if you have a need to surge do they have that capability if you're working with a small business they may not have that capability so you're gonna ask them specifically do they have the operational capability to meet your terms of course the pricing risk is where we're gonna have and look at their pricing we look at total cost not just the price you're paying but the total cost of operations maintenance landed cost all the taxes tariffs everything it takes to transport it from them to you okay the disposal costs anything and everything you know not just the price but you want to get total cost of ownership to hear that somebody may give you an awesome deal but they've created an Incoterms that's ex-works which means they expect to give you control and cost as soon as possible as early as possible and so you want to look at that we had somebody in our class they had an awesome deal from a company overseas but they had experts which means they were responsible for the payment for transporting those goods from overseas to their dock here in the United States now anywhere they responsible were paying for it they had to manage that and they were not experts in moving stuff throughout the world instead they were experts in doing what they did well so what they should have done was get different Incoterms more of the DDF type of come where the vendor was responsible for moving everything to you okay and they were responsible for doing that okay and then of course the cost and then the business itself is this a high quality business do they have the management team you're looking for do they have the experience do they have the capability of delivering the things you're looking for in doing that okay then we award the contract once we've gone through the evaluation process and we've gone through and we've decided who the best business person and we're going to use what the best business is we're going to award the contract and step one after going through the proposals we're going to negotiate yes we've decided on our top three vendors and now we're gonna get the best business best va
ue we can we're going to negotiate that that's entirely separate seminar we'll talk about how do you negotiate preparing for negotiations doing the negotiations and to make sure that you are in constantly in a win-win situation that is good for both of you because you're developing strategic partners not just tactical partners okay and then we're going to look at different types of contracts what is your favorite type of contract to use take a look at the chat box go and type in your answer is that firm fixed price is it cost reimbursable is it an IDIQ what kind of contract do you like to use it's going to type in the chat box let me know what kind of contract you like to use so that we can kind of get an idea what IDIQ okay good to go okay anybody firm fixed price okay fixed price good good good okay lots of lots of gossip you know a lot of people love the firm fixed price because it's easy what makes you determine the type of contract you're going to use is requirement and risk when I say requirement the requirement has to be well-defined defined enough so that you always have the ability to get the best proposal from your vendors that if it's a loose requirement you're not sure then you don't want to get a firm fixed price why because the vendor is going to price in risk everything that if they can't win they're gonna price in their risk if they're not sure exactly what their cost is going to be because it's a loose requirement they're going to give you a high price so based on the kind of requirement how define the requirement is that's going to determine first that's the first step is your requirement how to find it is what kind of contract you're going to use and then the other part is what kind of risk are you willing to take as a buyer as your company willing to take as a purchasing organization if it's not a lot of risk then firm fix might be the right answer if you're not sure then you may want to go for a cost plus but let's go through some different contracts and take a look at them and then based on that you can kind of determine which one is the best price let's go with the firm fixed price first everyone knows this basically you contracted with the vendor said I need widget a and they say okay here's a pry price for a widget a and it's what I'm going to deliver and that's it no matter what happens you're gonna pay that fixed price if the vendor has to go into more cost that's on them it's not on you escalation contract with escalation meaning if the price of the raw materials go up then there's a clause in there that allows the vendor to increase the cost of the contract which makes sense there's some commodities we just can't control the marketers control it's just like the price of oil the price of oil goes up when you want to escalation cost but then here recently we went through and there is oil prices dropped so there was an opportunity for costs to go down in a particular area so that may be where you put in a clause in there for redetermination which means at a certain point in time or under certain conditions you're going to renegotiate that price based on what the vendor is going to give you incentive if you have a certain quality requirement trying to meet or milestones you're trying to meet you incentivize it you award them you give them a good job so that you know you give them a reason to do and put forth more effort it remedies where you may predefined any remedies or claims against the contract so that you can limit your risk in a particular area downward price protection this is where the price of the commodity goes down that way you can also benefit from that downward price going down and then a level of effort fixed price with a level effort like on a service contract which means you're not gonna exceed a certain number of hours in that I'm period that way the vendor is not on the hook for more than what they've actually bid for they don't want to make them go and pay a lot more or labor cost and then what they've actually going to get paid to do the job so that's why yet firm fixed price with a fixed level of effort doing that then you have these cost reimbursable contracts which is just like they sound it's the cost of whatever it is you're going to reimburse them and then we're gonna add some maybe a fixed fee where you say okay it's gonna be cost reimbursable plus okay or you may have percentage of cost this is the most risky because it's cost go up so does the percentage of cost so it's gonna be more risky and incentives again just like with the firm fixed price you have certain quality or milestone requirements you're trying to achieve you want to incentivize that and if you may just say hey good job you're doing a great job you met Arden terms needs conditions more than what we got a little more than we expected so you give them an award fee on top of that suppose Cost Plus award fee and maybe just give them a straight cost-reimbursable we had this on a contract where we were bidding a contract on a human resource information system and basically the government wanted to do a firm fixed price because they wanted to fix that into the budget and anyone familiar with public purchasing you know it takes time to get money in the government process and there was one part of it that turned out to be very expensive and this was the interface integration between the old systems and the new systems and that can be very easy and it can also be very difficult for the vendor so this is a part where we've divided the contract up into a firm base price and a cost plus in this particular part where came integration there was a simply time and labor required to do the integration with a limited on the level of effort so that it didn't get out of control so this is where you have a different vehicle you can help control your risk and control your costs sharing where you have cost sharing maybe you're in a research and development company or you're going to work with a company that can do something more than with that widget that they're creating for you so you do a cost sharing a lot of times you see this with the government or public entity where the government will pay 70% and the private entity will pay 30% but the agreement there is that the private entity can then take that widget and sell it on the market so that there's a cost sharing there to do that so there's an agreement there okay then we have some other kind of contracts IDIQ which we mentioned before indefinite delivery indefinite quantity we don't know how much we need when we need it we just know we're gonna need is we going to put that on contract maybe a task order a service type contract or some type of construction where it's very specific a delivery order where you want to deliver it on certain time time materials similar to the cost reimbursable a blanket agreement where everything's already negotiated and then when you need it you go in and you pick it up and you pay for it as you use it a lot of times you'll see this off the supplies or other type of high-volume low-cost items like it agreements you have a requirements contract similar to a project contract where you basically contracting for specific requirements certain delivery certain quantity certain quality there's very specific requirements just like building a house this would be a similar type of contract for this requirement type contract a letter contract we work with letter contracts when we write proposals if the company accepts it then they sign off on it saying we accept this proposal so that's a letter contract a dealer's agreement is very similar to just like you and just like it sounds you're gonna purchase it and in return for selling it at a later date so that's it's a dealer's agreement and then you have these service agreements that's again service agreements you're talking about service information technology janitorial services maintenance services you may have a master service agreement where everything's already predefined you may have a professional service agreements maintenance agreements these are all different types of agreements that you can have in place for service agreements and then you have a license agreement one of my favorite shows is Shark Tank here in the US and one of my favorite stars on that show is Kevin mr. wonderful and what he loves is these licensing agreements where he just likes it as a guy I don't want any equity I just want a dollar in perpetuity for you whenever you sell this thing and we use licensing for software many of you deal with this will purchase 100 software licenses that means a hundred people can use those licenses if we go above that then we have to pay for more licenses we can't go that we may have technology these are all different kinds of licenses master purchase agreement predefined agreements just like The Supremes above specialty agreements these are all different crafts agreements now as you can see there's just lots of different things we can do we don't have to go with the firm fixed price and that's one of the reasons I wanted to go through this particular section today and I know it's a lot of material and there's a lot to learn in this particular area when it comes to different types of contracts this when you want to work with your customers getting exactly what they need then working with your legal team to get the right language into your contracts so that you get the best contract you need that's one easy to manage but it's also cost effective if you look at all these different kinds there's a lot of stuff to choose from so don't just go with the firm fixed price all the time if you go into the mindmap that's in the material section you can download that you can see how this whole list of stuff it's all let's spread out for you so you can take a look at all these different things right here okay then we want to war the contracts terms and conditions these are terms and conditions that we go on our contracts and there's always one or two concerns of conditions that we learn the hard way I know everyone has that these are terms and conditions where you know I got to make sure that people the vendors understand this stuff or else we get you know rolled and we end up going to the litigation going to court what is one clause that you make sure is correct in every single contract that you write or manage is it the payment terms echo terms awesome perfect you want to make sure that those Incoterms are well defined and who's responsible for insurance shipping logistics cost who's in that's that's a great great decision great great cause anyone else anybody payment terms is there their favorite they want to make sure hey there those are those vendors understand that stuff so they don't you know think they're gonna get you know paid in 30 days you know and then it doesn't happen okay so this is where you know this is what you're doing with with the terms of conditions you're setting it up for the vendor for the long term you're basically setting out standards that you expect the vendor to abide by during the length of this contract so this is one things you want to look at these are legal things what are the legal things where you going to go to court was on the financial we talked about the payment terms but I talked about legal make sure the legal language is correct make sure it's in writing my experience in business is if it's not in writing it doesn't exist if it wasn't in writing it doesn't exist the financial the payment terms when is it when are they gonna get paid is it that thirteen at sixty is it going to be net zero are their discount terms for early payment what are the terms sure diction where are you going to go to court this is especially important if you're doing business outside of your area if you're doing business in a different state in a different County in a different country if for some reason you have a conflict with your vendors or as a customer as a vendor you have a conflict with your customers where are you going to go to court and what law takes precedence in determining how we're going to decide this so knowing where you're gonna cuz you have to travel to the jurisdiction you have to do the legal fees there you gotta make sure the lawyers I can practice in those areas all that stuff so this is an important part that you want to make sure it's very clear to everyone who's responsible for insurance what's the minimum amount of insurance required security is theirs are there security requirements if you're dealing with information technology are the people working inside your organization or working on your projects do they have the right security background to work on your projects okay do you know one of the things here when you work with public contracting is that they have a minimum background check that they haven't been arrested or there's no warrants out for their arrest or anything like that so just a very simple background check to make sure that the right people are working in contractors are not employing criminals you're going to take stuff out the back door and then end up costing you a whole lot of money assign ability the assign ability Clause is is very important and this came up in a recent example I'd like to share with you the assign ability clause is where when we are doing the contract and all sudden say my business is sold to another company and I have contracts and in those contracts has an assigned ability clause a sonic building Clause reads that this contract may be assigned to another vendor or may not be assigned to another vendor unless approved by me in writing the example like to share with you is that I was working with you know someone in our training classes and they work for a battery company where they had proprietary information being developed by one of their vendors now of course they had the right contract with the vendors but their competition purchased that vendor to get to that proprietary information and because an assign ability clause in that contract they were able to cancel that contract and not allow the competition to get that technology so this is a very important clause you want to make sure it's clear in your contracts to protect yourself and protect your customers to make sure that you're not basically giving away the farm when's the company's is sold or so many want to sell the contract you know or they divest in something to do with that so this is something you want to think about claims here is the claims process if the contractor does something outside the terms of the contract there needs to be a defined process on how they're going to get paid and claims is where we define that process what exactly do they have to do how they're gonna get paid so they can move forward their warranties implied and Express warranties implied warranties are basically to get what I paid for the next press warranties are very specific conditions where we have warranties meaning you know here in the US we sell cars five years fifty thousand mile warranty on the transmission a common example other Express warranties may be you know must not do your own maintenance on this if you do it boys a warranty any different conditions and conditions that you may have that you have with warranties have that to find the interpreters as well and then remedies if things go wrong what is the limit on those remedies limited liability if you're gonna pay note what we put in our contracts that we pay no more than the value of the contract that anything you know if we have a you know fifty thousand dollar training contract that if we you know for some reason go to court and we lose we're not gonna pay any more than fifty thousand dollars in cost and liabilities in that area so that helps define and controls our risk in those areas as well okay and then you know so that's all the different how you Worr the contracts things you need to think about when you award the contract these are all different things and again I know you live in this world and it's not easy it takes time and if you have well-defined processes where you use something like this we're able to go through a checklist every single time you get better and better and better and once you award the contract then you go through
ontract administration and that's actually a separate webinar which we'll do here the near future we'll go through and think about how that we best want to administrator contracts so that we always get the best value and there's not only things that are in writing but there's things you can do leadership wise to give you even more value from your vendors and we recently talked about that our supply chain ASIS program where you learn to use the disk method to help get more value from your customers and your vendors to do that okay in summary we talked about today two elements of the perfect requirement we talked about that you want to make sure you have performance specification you only exactly what has to do and what it looks like and then those such cases to be as specific as possible talk to your customers speak to them and spend time developing a very clear requirement they can hand you a sample of exactly what they're looking for even better that way when you go to market the vendors have no doubt what they're looking for and how they're going to serve you what are four different procurement strategies we talked about just an offer an informal offer the RFP process we just went through in detail and then our sealed bits talked about three parts of managing your RFP make sure it's comparable fair and easy to manage and then the four elements to effectively evaluate the proposal we went through those elements there as well as a 13 different types of contracts and what I love to hear is and more from you is you know different types of contracts that you use so that you can be successful as well so think about that so you can do that as you know what we do is we train people on how to pass the cpsf certification exams and there's things that we do we go out throughout the country and we help people learn these skills and a whole lot more so that they're certified professional in the procurement field and it's what we do here coming up and what I'd like to do is offer you a special today for being here with me on Friday before Memorial Day ten percent off just use the code Memorial - 10 when you go to our page and as you can see here we have several different events coming up here in the near future will be in Boca Raton next week Anchorage Alaska at the end of August September Chicago DC in October Atlanta in December if you are interested in any of those and register today and get 10% off if for some reason you're having challenges or need to get through a procurement approval process for corporate training just give us a call and let us know okay I understand bye bye I'm getting ready to wrap up here and I'll field a few questions I really appreciate everyone's time don't forget you have a special offer 10% off on any of our training just go to our website CPS em training com let us know please go on LinkedIn give us some comments let people know how great the seminar was and what you learned and how it can add the value to what you're doing here in the future now I'd like to do now is open it up to questions if you just go ahead and chat your question in the chat what I'll do is I'll read the question and I'll answer for the group and we'll do that for about you know five minutes or until you know we run out of questions so anyone has a question go ahead and just type it into the chat box I know anyway again as people are typing go ahead and just go and put your questions in is you you know what I really like about these processes is that it really helps people start to get better and more efficient in what we have going on in our own shops a lot of times when we have people going through our training is that they they don't have a process well defined it's just something that is they're doing every requirements different so every process is different they're always running and jumping through hoops trying to make things happen and and that's just not fun you know so by getting a process getting it well defined educating your internal customers on what these processes are is just gonna make your life even easier and then getting even stronger is when you get these tools and you start getting proficient with your different tools it makes it even better even that okay so okay so I have a question it says what actual what is conflict of interest okay that's a great question and that comes up a lot here in the United States and what conflicts of interest is it's when somebody who has the buying decision or who has influence on the people making the purchasing decision so you're myself if I was buying something from somebody then I have a personal relationship with somebody one of my vendors which may influence my decision they could be a relative so because they're my brother or sister brother-in-law sister-in-law then I would award them the contract and they would have undue influence or they would have unfair advantage over other vendors just because they're a relative of mine okay or you have a business interest in a local business there's this was an example I've heard several times where a buyer owns a business this just came up last week actually in a class we were working with you know a buyer who's in Hawaii and he had this actual example he's working on the University and one of his employees for the university owned a company and he was making decisions to purchase the from that company which he personally owned because it was his company so that was a conflict of interest in other words he wasn't making decision based on what's the best value or the best price he was making that decision based on it being one his company he wanted the business another example is you make the decision based on the mere relative or they've offered you something and return for the business which then of course you know does not keep us above reproach we have to be and must be above reproach at all time so that whenever we make a decision people believe what we tell them that we're doing it for the right reasons and what's what's best for the company okay does that make sense that helped garner that help okay now the next question I have is RFP the same as RFQ only that one is a proposal and the other is a quote correct great great question Alphonse but as our Fe RF is RFP equal to RQ the difference is that when you do an RFQ you're simply asking for a quote you may do this when you have three or four vendors that you work with all the time they know who what your specifications are they know what your requirements are you say hey give me a requirement for widget why that's our in other words everything's already defined RFP is more more complicated and nothing you're just putting the proposal on the street and then the vendors are going to give back to you not only the what but the how they're gonna basically say hey this is how we're gonna solve your problem in detail for a quote you're just asking for a price for a proposal and you're asking not only for the price but you're asking for the details on how they're gonna solve your problem okay does that make sense okay now one more comment that says you have mentioned some your previous presentation that I've missed is there a way I can have copies documentation from those presentations and is it possible absolutely please send me an email telling me exactly what you want if it's the vendor rationalization one absolutely we can set that up and send that to you as well as give you the mind map from that presentation as well if there's anything else again anyone on the webinar still with us we can actually great great attendance today you know if you need anything or have any questions please email me directly I'm gonna give you my personal email address take us llc.com i put that the chat box you can send me an email directly to that email address and i will answer any question that you have and send you anything that you asked for last one are there any instance where you can bypass these processes great question should i bypass this process well the thing that would determine when you may want to bypass these processes is time time being the most expensive of the resources we have how much time do you have to go through these processes if you have the time I recommend going through the processes the risk of not going through these processes are that you don't get the best value for your dollar because you're just making a decision on one or two pieces of information versus having all your vendors compete for your business which then gives you a better understanding of what's available to market as well as give me a better understanding of what's available in the price okay so lots of different things there okay one question I have in Pakistan public procurement Regulatory Authority has a clause there's no negotiation with the vendor the lowest bid will be considered as a negotiated bit what is your opinion on it my opinion on that and I've dealt with this before as well on my experience with purchasing for the federal government in the United States and it seems to be that they're always lowest bid goes that way the key to success when you have this situation is that your RFP must be as detailed as possible to the point that whatever is proposed is going to meet your needs and more meaning that if you expect high quality you have to put that in your requirements so that whatever is proposed meets that quality standard and if it doesn't meet that quality standard then it didn't quote-unquote meet the terms of your RFP so then you don't have to award to that business so the key to this lowest bid will be considered as negotiated or is what it is and always you have to go with the lowest bid that's what you have to do okay you have to be very detailed in your RFP so that there's very little wiggle room in regards to getting what you're actually looking for okay so that's the key to the RFP and I would love to work with you on that hack bar if you have an example we get on the phone I can help you redefine that a little bit and you know and help maybe point out some things where it may be a little loose and I can maybe help you tighten it up a little bit so that you don't get in those kind of situations we end up awarding to the lowest bidder and then affecting the service and quality you're giving your customers and that's what we don't want we don't want that to where you award a contract to a vendor and it ends up not working out for your customers yet does go through the process again and then you get this you get a reputation and that's we're trying to protect here is your reputation of credibility and being a trusted person to make things work to do that okay good deal other questions please provide my your email address I provide a little bit earlier let me do it again take us llc.com okay again anyone has any questions please email me I'll answer your questions question is this recorded yes it is recorded and it will be available later all I'll do is go through make sure everything makes sense you can hear my voice and see my screen and I will post this it'll be on a web page so you can't go in and take a look at it maybe share with your colleagues as well okay we're right at the end of the hour I want to thank you have a great weekend everyone please be safe this weekend if you're in the United States Memorial Day weekend is one of those weekends we have a lot of people out there on the road travel safe be safe take care of your family for those of us on the international community have a great weekend as well be safe take care of your family and if I can do anything for you again you have my email address and there shoot me an email and I will be happy to take care of that for you have a great weekend and I will talk with you soon
