Responsive (formerly RFPIO)

Avantages

Le suivi des échéances sur logiciel est au top

Inconvénients

Les outils de collaboration de Responsive (formerly RFPIO) est ne sont pas très efficace

Avantages

It's quite a luxury to be using Responsive when working with RFPs, customer/vendor questionnaires and similar documents that require gathering knowledge and answering inquiries. Most companies I know still use manual processes for the same and keep on having to redo the same work over and over again. Responsive provides an easy workflow, enterprise level access control and ability to build up a strong database of knowledge bits to semi-automate the necessary tasks and get answers to customers in a much faster way.

Inconvénients

While I don't have direct experience with the ETL process that moves questions from customer systems/documents to Responsive, based on what I observe, the platform could be doing a better job of maintaining the question formats (e.g., multiple choice selections, drop-down fields, etc.)

Avantages

Being able to track who completes each question, review, and task, and when they do it.

Inconvénients

Responsive sometimes does not recognize RFP documents in the import configuration setting.

Avantages

1. the ability of AI to find response recommendations from previously answered questions
2. the ability to tag or invite someone to assist with a1. particular question
3. the notification email that there are still outstanding questions
4. the team collaboration and what their duties are

Inconvénients

1. Limited view of RFP or the difficulty to reviewing the document
2. Garbage in is garbage out and if there isn't enough responses for a particular question then no data
3. Difficulty of editing, undoing to adding special type functionality
4. Requires automatic save as the solution seemed to consistently delete material and very difficult or impossible to retrieve it.
5. Difficult inserting pictures or cutting and pasting information from other sources.

Avantages

I like how user-friendly it is. I'm also enjoying the new grammar check capability.

Inconvénients

How difficult it is to set up saved searches.

Avantages

How powerful is the tool and how depth you can go on the answering library page and project

Inconvénients

Licensing costs and slow response times when pasting text into search functions

Avantages

The collaboration features, the Auto Respond feature, the mapping of projects and easy export into the source document.

Inconvénients

Not a con as such, perhaps an inherent limitation of source files, but I would like some more accommodation of trickier source documents that e.g. have conditional questions (e.g. if Yes, reply to next question, if Not, do not) or documents that show or hide questions depending on how you previously answered to the questions above. Not sure if something could be enhanced in the tool to accommodate this, or other non-user-friendly types of RFx source files.

Avantages

AI enabled RFP responding platform which provides automatic prompts for each question. Collaborative platform allows entire teams to work on a single project.

Inconvénients

Formatting when downloading means that images are not embedded in cells during download and extraction process.

Avantages

Responsive makes finding content so simple. The recommended answers, along with the ability to search in many different ways (keyword, tags, facets) has made creating responses fast, and as easy as possible.

Inconvénients

I wish formatting answers was a little easier.

Avantages

I like the content library and the efficiency of managing projects.

Inconvénients

The inability to distill bids within the platform.

Avantages

What I liked the most about Responsive is that it enables collaboration between various teams without the need to rely on external software. Its integration with Slack also enabled me to stay on top on any meaningful changes to RFPs I'm involved in.

Inconvénients

The most problematic aspect of the software is its notification scheme. I often get Daily Task Reports for sections that are 100% complete and require no work from me as a contributor. My understanding is this cannot be limited by any setting.

Avantages

That it was very easy to start working with, and that we have all the previous content in a very accesible way. The reports we receive are great, as we can have an overview of the projects and create stats on how we are working.

Inconvénients

We need to work very hard to keep everything updated. We have too many products and sub-companies, and therefore it is very difficult to use the AI automatic answers. There are many applications we are not using because they are limited to the admin, so I dont think we are using the full power of the tool. But that is more on us, I guess.

Avantages

Having a central store for questions that we've been asked in the past and what our answers for those questions are is very important. We get a lot of RFPs/RFIs and Security Questionnaires around our company and solutions and it is a crowdsourced effort across various teams within our company. Giving everyone access to these past responses and the ability to flag what they apply to and when they need to be refreshed is very key for us to response to customer requests quickly and with a high degree of accuracy and completeness.

Inconvénients

We've been using the solution for awhile and we have a lot of data inside. Some needs to be reworded or updated to remain relevant. We plan on using the A.I. capabilities to help with this updating.

Avantages

The way it makes our lives easier to handle RFP's is just amazing. Lots of options like content library, reviews, etc.

Inconvénients

Everything's almost perfect I would say as I didn't find any noticeable fault.

Avantages

Responsive has a great content library which grows over time and auto-tags relevant answers.

Inconvénients

The import process for importing files into the tool should be more smooth and user friendly.

Avantages

The way to handle RFP becomes very easy. The content library or the knowledge management platform is where we have benefited a lot.

Inconvénients

The User Interface could be developed and it hangs a bit while loading the content library.

Avantages

Ability to easily manage and see which projects teammates are working on. Ability to assign sections of proposals/RFPs to specific team members. Ability to import customer RFPs into platform and export easily.

Inconvénients

Sometimes the search may not return what you may be expecting. Tags are a feature which can be used to help you categorize what you are looking for.

Avantages

Being able to security related information quickly.

Inconvénients

The interface of copying and pasting answers from the platform into emails, slacks, or other applications has been poor.

Avantages

responsiveness and alertness and how knowledgeable

Inconvénients

nothing we love responsiveness and alertness and how knowledgeable

Avantages

It is the intelligent answer library that makes it easy to find and reuse content from past projects.

Inconvénients

It is the export to Word process that can be frustrating and time-consuming.

Avantages

What I like most about RFPIO is the ability to store content and knowledge in sections and answer format. Once populated with verified content, it reduces the resources required to compile a standard proposal and the author and reviewer functions streamline team contributions. Custom merge fields, categories, keywords, etc. offer a lot of flexibility over how you organize and retrieve your content.

Inconvénients

Although RFPIO is a great resource for storing and organizing content and knowledge, it's limited control over the formatting of the content means that exporting proposals through multiple iterations can be time consuming. Word templates do a decent job of providing a base look and feel but working with things such as line spacing, tables, etc. is finicky and image quality from RFPIO to Word document to PDF can result in poor end quality. Once I have compiled the bulk of the project and exported to Word, I tend to continue with Word and then am forced to go back and update any content changes in RFPIO to reflect the final results. It is not efficient to make changes and re-export each time.

Avantages

RFPIO provides the workflow automation and a centralized area for customer facing knowledge as expected. The system really has made managing content and bids much more streamlined.

Inconvénients

There are some usability issues (i.e. deleting documents that were previously linked to a Q&A pair, inconstancies with the new and legacy UI functionality, ability to delete comments in the Q&A library, none ideal visibility and filtering for users, etc.). While the system support team is responsive to bug logs, it can take a long time (months) for resolutions or fixes to issues and there is no real proactive communication from our account team.

Avantages

I do not even know where to begin! RFPIO has changed the way I do proposals forever, and I cannot imagine being without it. It gives me the time to not just meet the RFP requirements, but to actually be able to customize and tailor my responses, something I did not always have the luxury of time to do. It allows me to complete more RFPs than ever before. I cannot even begin to list everything I love about RFPIO, but one thing that stands out is the collaboration aspect and being able to do a first run of answering questions based on what I have in my library, and then being able to assign questions out and follow their activity, It allows me to meet deadlines with a high quality response time and time again. And saves me time!

Inconvénients

I am going to say NOTHING, because anytime I have had an issue or a desire for a new function, the RFPIO team is so responsive and has helped me through or even added a new feature. The one thing I wish it had, and I believe is in development, is a way to check when a draft of an answer is complete, but not marked as answered yet.

Avantages

I think that RFPio does a phenomenal job of allowing us to import our RFPs and to keep an up-to-date library of our most common answers. It's a great way to centralize our processes.

Inconvénients

I think the import tool and the options for declaring entries (description, section, question, sub question, etc) can be a bit confusing. That said, I didn't go through an official training on the system, and inherited it from someone who inherited it. I think the concern is more with my organization, but I do think there are improvements that can be made to the import area in particular. Especially, for example, if there is a table built within a larger PDF document.

Avantages

RFPIO is easy to use, frequently updated, and always evolving and improving. It is NOT an older product with a facelift - it's an entirely new way of doing things. If you're looking for a change - and you're open to doing things differently - the efficiencies are yours to gain. Updating content is very simple, and the UI is extremely intuitive.

Inconvénients

My SMEs are resistant to it -- they complain that working within the system is more work than working in the Word doc. I think it's a comfort issue, and there's no simple, straight-forward user training I can point them to. I wish they had training modules. Like, I am a SME - I am assigned this training module to teach me all of the skills I will need.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Responsive (formerly RFPIO)