Bid/RFP Management

As a company, we actively submit proposals on various bids and RFPs for K-12, food banks, higher education and government accounts.  We want to capture this information at the account level and have the ability to run reports.  Trying to figure out our best option and thought Sugar may be able to accommodate this business process.  Since we typically have to submit our proposals on specific forms supplied by the account, we don't need to generate our own forms.  It's really just a matter of tracking the information.  We started using Revenue Line Items to record the information, but I'm not sure that's going to work long term.  Curious to see if anyone else handles a similar business process within Sugar and how do you manage?  

  • A couple of years ago I decided to take a form we had created, an RFP Tracking Document, and create a module in Sugar.

  • Thank you for the quick response.  I really like the idea of creating a module, but I have a few questions.  When creating a new RFP, do you start with a Lead or an Account?  Are you able to run reports from this module that are detailed or can be viewed as a dashlet on your dashboard?  Did you create workflows within this module?  Do you have a suggested training video on how to create such a module?

  • Module Builder is an easy way to create custom modules in SugarCRM for what you need.

    support.sugarcrm.com/.../

    Any Module Builder custom module can have reports run against it, and you can set up dashlets for it as needed. For example, a List View Dashlet can be set up just like for any other module with easy front-end configuration, but if you need more specific ones with charts etc you will need to do some work to build them. 

    You can build a module without a lot of technical knowledge in Sugar but you will need to put some careful thought into the design of your module to meet not only your working needs but also your reporting needs.
    You will also need some degree of technical knowledge of the Sugar application and its subtleties. For example, there are some subtle but fundamental differences between Relate fields and Relationships that will impact what you do/do not see in your subpanels etc.. You will need to keep in mind relationship cardinality etc... so it would be good to have someone familiar with RDBMS design to walk you through the discovery and design of your module.
    If you don't have anyone with that technical background at your company I would suggest talking to a Sugar Partner to design it for you. There are several good ones out there and you can see many are active participants in the Sugar Developer community :)

    BTW John has Account and Opportunity on this RFP record so, if he is working with Accounts/Leads as they are out of the box, he is linking this to an Account, not a Lead (Leads are not liked to Accounts in Sugar, they have an Account name but not a related Account record)

    FrancescaS

  • Hi Amy,

    As John and Francesca have already said,  this should be a simple process to create in module builder,  you may also want to use SugarCRMs Business Process Manager to automate alerts for particular key dates etc.

    Just so you are also aware, as this is a custom module this would have to be a separate new pipeline report to your existing opportunities reports, should you wish to display on things like dashboards.

    If we can help, please feel free to get in touch. We are enable.services and have been a SugarCRM partner since 2005 based in the UK.

    Thanks

    Joe

    www.enable.services/.../

  • Hi Joe,

    Thank you, I am interested in talking with someone about the assistance that can be offered.  

  • Hi Amy,

    I have some Ideas on how we can handle this in Sugar with a combination of mostly Core features.

    Let's talk about your requirements in more detail.

    Erik Tavenner

    Sr. Solutions Consultant

  • I'm interested in discussing, but what will that involve?  We don't currently have a subscription to SugarCare Services.   

  • Hi Amy,

    My company, Upsert, currently partners with customers in the food manufacturing & distribution business. The use case you're highlighting is something that Sugar can achieve and manage. As others have highlighted, starting with a custom module is likely the best first step to take, and understanding how you want to leverage that information throughout the system will help guide how best to structure that module and any business logic associated with it. I sent you a connection request if you would like to speak further so we can better understand all the business needs you have around tracking the bids & RFPs.

    Chris

  • An RFP is in effect an opportunity, so I would add all the necessary fields to capture the data and group them under a tab Called RFP within the Opportunities module, unless there are too many fields then a custom RFP module related to Opportunities would also be a good solution..