The Portable Consultant’s recent RFP was whittled down to two or three vendors and this was the week they did their demo presentations, the penultimate step in the process (all that’s left is price negotiations).

Although our RFP is for a web content management (WCM) system, the client has been interested in enterprise content management (ECM) vendors from the start because:

1) they have no ECM systems currently in place and…

2) at least some of the business case for the WCM overlapped with ECM functionality.

We reinforced this thinking with a WCM RFP that also touched on document management (DM), records management (RM), and digital asset management (DAM) requirements.

As designed, the RFP scoring scheme brought to the top the WCM vendors for whom WCM was just one component of a full ECM suite. The leaders each have full-blown ECM solutions which include WCM, DM, RM (including physical records), DAM, and imaging. This minimizes integration and simplifies pricing, maintenance, and support.

The WCM project team managed to prepare a tightly scripted demo outline that the vendors were told to follow. We didn’t want them simple display their respective strong points and leave us trying to compare apples with oranges. Our script touched on most of the demonstrable features that we listed in our RFP, anyway. There was no reason to go anywhere else because all the scored points were in the script.

So, although all vendors demonstrated what amounted to full ECM functionality the one that stuck most closely to the script is the one that got the client’s full attention… no one in the audience had to worry about what feature was being demonstrated, they just followed a printed checklist.

All the shortlisted vendors’ products met the requirements, but the vendor who stuck to the script is the one that left the most positive impression.

The moral of the story: if you are using a formal RFP process to select ECM (or other) solutions, consider scripting their demonstration and sync RFP requirements. If you’re a vendor, be sure you stick to the script.

Cheers,
-pmh