From Spreadsheets to Smart Flows: Automating RFQs at Epicforge

The modern procurement team is buried. Ask any procurement manager about their day, and they'll likely have a story about a Request for Quotation (RFQ) that took on a life of its own.

It starts with a vague request from an internal stakeholder. Then comes the scramble to find the last-used template, digging through shared drives and old email chains. You spend hours manually copy-pasting specifications, updating legal terms, and building a vendor list. Then, you play email ping-pong, chasing stakeholders for approvals before the RFQ even goes out.

This "week-long RFQ prep" is more than just an administrative headache. It's a costly bottleneck. It's frustrating for the team, confusing for vendors, and results in lost leverage and potential maverick spend as stakeholders bypass a process they see as too slow.

Mapping the Manual RFQ Lifecycle

To understand the solution, we must first respectfully diagnose the problem. The traditional, manual RFQ lifecycle is fraught with friction at every single step:

1. Intake & Creation: A request lands via email, often missing key specs, budget codes, or delivery dates. The procurement specialist then wastes a day chasing this information before manually building the RFQ document, often introducing errors by copying from outdated spreadsheets.
2. Sourcing & Distribution: A static, often-outdated vendor list is used. The RFQ is manually attached to dozens of separate emails. There's no way to track who has opened it, who intends to bid, or to answer questions in a way that all vendors can see.
3. Collection & Consolidation: This is the spreadsheet chaos. Bids return in a dozen different formats—PDFs, Word docs, and Excel files with different columns. The team spends hours, sometimes days, manually transcribing this data into a "master comparison" spreadsheet.
4. Analysis & Award: Comparing bids is a subjective, error-prone mess. Stakeholders (legal, finance, IT) are roped back in for approvals, creating another email bottleneck. By the time a decision is made, the business need has become urgent, and pricing may have changed.

Each of these steps is a black hole for time, a magnet for manual errors, and a point of complete process opacity.

Introducing Epicforge Smart Flows

This is where we fundamentally shift from manual tasks to intelligent automation. Epicforge’s "Procurement Operating System" isn't just another tool; it's a new way to work.

Instead of a blank spreadsheet, your journey starts in a single, intelligent workspace.

• AI-Generated Templates: Our system uses AI to help you build a comprehensive RFQ in minutes, not days. Based on the category, historical data, and your initial request, it suggests specifications, compliance questions, and scoring criteria. It ensures 100% of requirements are captured instantly.
• Automated Workflows: As soon as the draft is ready, the system automatically routes it for approval. No more chasing. Epicforge knows your policies—if an IT request is over $50,000, it automatically notifies the CIO and finance manager.
• Centralized Vendor Communication: The RFQ is released to vendors through a single portal. Questions are managed in a central Q&A log, ensuring all vendors have the same information. Automated reminders are sent to non-responsive vendors, boosting response rates by (as we've seen with clients) over 60%.
• Automated Bid Analysis: As bids arrive, our system automatically normalizes the data and presents it in a clean, side-by-side comparison dashboard. Compliance checks are run instantly. This eliminates 90% of manual data entry errors and frees your team to focus on strategic analysis, not transcription.

Implementation Blueprint

Moving to an automated system can feel daunting, but the path is straightforward. We partner with you to ensure a smooth transition, not a disruptive IT project.

1. Phase 1: Discovery & Data (Weeks 1-2): We start by understanding your world. We’ll gather your existing RFQ templates, key policies (like approval matrices and compliance rules), vendor lists, and historical pricing data.
2. Phase 2: Configuration (Weeks 3-4): Our team configures your Epicforge workspace. We translate your policies into automated approval flows, set up your templates, and establish your vendor database.
3. Phase 3: Testing (Weeks 5-6): We conduct User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with a core group of your procurement specialists. We run test RFQs from intake to award to ensure every rule and workflow functions perfectly.
4. Phase 4: Rollout (Weeks 7-8): We believe in rolling out in waves. We'll start with one or two high-impact categories (like IT Hardware or Marketing Services) to build momentum. We provide full training to this first wave, gather feedback, and then expand across the organization.

Measuring Impact

The goal of automation is to deliver tangible, measurable results. We focus on tracking a few key performance indicators (KPIs) to prove the ROI from day one.

• Key KPIs:

  • Procurement Cycle Time: This is the big one. We measure the time from initial request to supplier award, aiming to cut it by up to 80%.
  • Stakeholder Satisfaction: We use simple pulse-surveys to track whether your internal teams (IT, Marketing, Finance) are happier with the process.
  • Approval Velocity: How long does an approval sit in someone's inbox? We track this in hours and minutes, not days and weeks.
  • Vendor Engagement: Are you getting more bids, faster? We track vendor response rates and time-to-respond.

• Quick Wins (First 30 Days):

  • You should see zero "which version is this?" emails.
  • You will have a single, real-time dashboard showing the status of every single RFQ.
  • Your first automated RFQ will be completed in half the time (or less) of your manual average.

Next Steps for Procurement Leaders

The move from chaotic spreadsheets to smart, automated flows is no longer an "if" but a "when." For leaders ready to champion this change, here is a simple checklist to get started:

1. Audit Your Bottlenecks: For the next week, simply track where your team's time is really going. Where are the top 3 delays in your current RFQ process?
2. Identify a Pilot: Pick one category—just one—that is high-volume and high-friction. This will be your pilot case.
3. Calculate the Cost of Inaction: What is the business cost of a 4-week RFQ process when the market moves in days?
4. Get Executive Sponsorship: This is the most critical step. Frame this investment not as a "procurement tool" but as a "business velocity engine." Use the audit data to show the financial and productivity cost of doing nothing.
5. Focus on Change Management: The goal is to make your team's life easier. Position Epicforge as a tool that eliminates the admin they hate so they can focus on the strategic work they love.

When you're ready to stop managing spreadsheets and start driving strategy, we're here to help you build the blueprint.