Why RFPs Endure: What the History of the RFP Teaches Us About Procurement

The Request for Proposal (RFP) has survived an extraordinary amount of technological change.

Procurement professionals once distributed requirements on paper. Vendors prepared physical proposal packages. Documents traveled by mail and courier. Evaluation happened around conference tables with printed binders, handwritten notes, and calculators.

Today, an RFP can be created, distributed, answered, evaluated, negotiated, and archived without anyone touching a piece of paper.

Yet the basic model remains remarkably familiar.

A requestor defines a need. Qualified vendors are invited to respond. Each vendor explains how it would meet the requirements. The requestor evaluates competing proposals against defined criteria and selects the offering it believes provides the greatest value.

There is a reason this process has endured.

RFPs solve several difficult procurement problems at once. They create a structured mechanism for competition. They allow organizations to evaluate factors beyond price. They establish requirements before vendors compete. They create a record of how alternatives were evaluated. And they give complex vendors room to explain solutions that cannot reasonably be represented by a single number.

Those principles remain valuable.

The more interesting question is whether the process used to achieve them must remain largely unchanged.

The history of the RFP suggests an answer. Procurement has evolved before when the complexity of what organizations purchased exceeded the capabilities of the existing process. Today’s technology creates another opportunity to evolve while preserving the principles that made RFPs valuable in the first place.

Competitive Procurement Began With a Simpler Problem

The history of modern RFPs is closely connected to the broader history of competitive procurement.

Government purchasing provides one of the clearest documented examples because its procedures were formalized through statutes and regulations. For much of the development of modern public procurement, competitive bidding offered a powerful mechanism for purchasing clearly defined goods and services.

The logic was straightforward.

Describe what the government needs. Invite qualified suppliers to compete. Receive bids under controlled conditions. Evaluate them according to established criteria. Award the contract to the responsible bidder offering the most advantageous bid under those criteria.

The modern Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) still preserves this model through sealed bidding. An invitation for bids must describe government requirements clearly, bids are submitted for public opening, evaluation occurs without discussions, and the award is based on price and the price-related factors identified in the solicitation.

For many purchases, that model is exceptionally effective.

If an organization can define exactly what it wants and suppliers can offer substantially comparable products, competition can focus heavily on price and other measurable terms. The procurement mechanism does not need to ask each supplier to explain an entirely different solution.

But organizations do not purchase only commodities.

As the products and services being acquired become more complex, the procurement problem changes.

Complex Purchases Required More Than a Bid

Consider the difference between buying a standardized product and purchasing a sophisticated professional service.

For the standardized product, the requestor may already know exactly what it needs. Assuming quality and other requirements are established, suppliers can compete primarily around price, availability, and contractual terms.

A complex service presents a different problem.

The requestor may understand the outcome it wants without being able to specify precisely how every vendor should achieve it. Different vendors may offer legitimately different approaches. Technical capabilities may matter. Service models may differ. Implementation strategies, staffing, experience, risk, contractual commitments, and other factors may influence the value of the offering.

Price remains important, but price alone cannot answer the purchasing question.

Procurement therefore needs a way for vendors to propose solutions.

This distinction became embedded in U.S. federal procurement. The Armed Services Procurement Act of 1947 and Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949 helped establish the postwar federal procurement framework, while later reforms increasingly distinguished between competitive and noncompetitive procedures rather than treating negotiated procurement as inherently outside competition.

The Competition in Contracting Act of 1984 further strengthened the role of competition in federal purchasing. The law required agencies to allow and encourage the maximum number of sources to submit sealed bids or competitive proposals and reinforced full and open competition as a central federal procurement principle.

The modern FAR reflects the resulting distinction clearly. Sealed bidding is appropriate when factors such as price can determine the award and discussions with offerors are unnecessary. When those conditions are not appropriate, contracting officers can request competitive proposals instead.

The RFP provides the mechanism for doing so.

Current federal rules describe RFPs as tools used in negotiated acquisitions to communicate requirements and solicit proposals. Competitive RFPs identify the government’s requirements, anticipated contract terms, information vendors must provide, and the significant factors used to evaluate their proposals.

That is a fundamentally different procurement problem than asking, “What is your price?”

It asks, “How would you solve our problem, and why should we choose your approach?”

EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE
A bid is powerful when the buyer can define the answer. A proposal becomes valuable when qualified vendors may have different answers worth considering.

The RFP Became an Extremely Effective Procurement Tool

It is easy to criticize RFPs today because their administrative burdens are highly visible.

Their benefits can be easier to overlook precisely because they have become normal.

A well-designed RFP gives an organization a disciplined way to define what it needs before evaluating who should provide it. Requirements can be communicated consistently to competing vendors. Evaluation criteria can be established in advance. Vendors can explain capabilities and approaches that would disappear in a price-only comparison.

That structure also supports fairness.

Competing vendors receive a common description of the opportunity. Procurement teams can establish consistent evaluation criteria. Internal stakeholders can contribute specialized expertise while working within the same overall process.

Perhaps most importantly, RFPs allow procurement to recognize that value is multidimensional.

Federal procurement similarly distinguishes among approaches for obtaining best value, including tradeoff processes and lowest-price-technically-acceptable methods. That framework reflects the broader principle that the appropriate evaluation method depends on what the buyer is purchasing.

That concept extends far beyond government procurement.

Organizations rarely select complex vendors based on price alone. Quality, service, experience, implementation, capabilities, risk, strategic alignment, contractual terms, and other considerations can all affect value.

The RFP gave organizations a mechanism capable of capturing those differences.

Its longevity should therefore be viewed as evidence of success, not evidence that procurement failed to innovate.

But successful processes can accumulate complexity.

Complexity Turned an RFP Strength Into Administrative Weight

The ability to ask vendors detailed questions is one of the RFP’s greatest strengths.

It can also become one of its greatest administrative burdens.

As purchasing categories become more sophisticated, organizations naturally seek more information. Questionnaires expand. Subject matter experts contribute additional requirements. Finance teams request detailed pricing. Legal teams examine contractual provisions. Operational teams evaluate implementation. Technology teams review integrations, data, security, and reporting.

Each addition can be completely reasonable.

Collectively, however, they create increasingly large information sets that must be produced, collected, reviewed, normalized, and compared.

The RFP itself did not cause this complexity. The complexity comes from what organizations are purchasing.

Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM) procurement is a useful example. A modern PBM evaluation may consider pricing guarantees, pharmacy networks, specialty pharmacy, formulary strategy, clinical programs, implementation, reporting, member experience, contract terms, and numerous other factors that cannot reasonably be reduced to a simple bid. The RFP is valuable precisely because it gives employers, health plans, coalitions, unions, consultants, and other requestors a mechanism for examining those differences.

But the sophistication of the category also exposes the administrative consequences of the model.

A PBM may answer hundreds of questions and provide spreadsheets, exhibits, contractual language, pricing files, and supporting documents. Competing PBMs may describe similar capabilities using different terminology or structures. Consultants and procurement teams then invest significant effort organizing those responses into something that can be meaningfully compared.

The lesson is not that PBM procurement has outgrown the principles behind the RFP.

It is that a sophisticated purchasing category can expose the limitations of repeatedly collecting and restructuring information that could increasingly be maintained in reusable, comparable forms.

Digital Procurement Changed the Container More Than the Model

Technology has already transformed the mechanics of RFPs.

Word processors replaced typewriters. Email replaced physical delivery. Spreadsheets transformed financial analysis. Online procurement platforms centralized communications and submissions. Cloud storage made documents accessible to distributed teams.

These improvements eliminated enormous amounts of friction.

But look beneath the technology and the information flow often remains familiar:

Requestor asks -> Vendors respond -> Requestor organizes -> Requestor compares

The documents became digital.

The underlying information architecture changed much less.

This matters because digitization and modernization are not necessarily the same thing.

Turning a paper questionnaire into an online questionnaire makes distribution easier. Uploading five proposals into a procurement platform makes the documents easier to manage. Using AI to summarize those proposals may make portions of the evaluation considerably faster.

Each can create genuine value.

But all three begin after the organization has decided to ask vendors to recreate information for that particular procurement.

Much of that information may not actually be unique to the opportunity.

A vendor’s foundational capabilities, organizational information, service models, implementation approaches, programs, and other characteristics may be explained repeatedly across many RFPs. Each requestor then receives that information and performs its own work to organize and compare it.

For decades, much of this repetition was unavoidable.

It increasingly is not.

EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE
The values behind the RFP have aged remarkably well. The information architecture surrounding it has not.

Reusable Information Changes the Starting Point

Modern technology creates an alternative that earlier procurement systems could not easily provide.

Vendor information can now be structured rather than merely documented. It can be stored securely. Access can be limited to qualified requestors. Information can be updated continuously. Offerings can be searched, filtered, and compared. Analytical systems can operate against consistent fields instead of repeatedly extracting information from unrelated documents.

Most importantly, foundational vendor information can become reusable.

That changes the starting point of procurement.

Instead of requiring every requestor to initiate the creation of every piece of information, vendors can maintain portions of their offerings before a specific procurement begins.

The requestor can then begin by asking:

• What options exist?
• Which vendors appear capable of meeting our needs?
• How do their approaches differ?
• What information do we already have?
• What do we still need to ask?

Those questions do not eliminate the RFP.

They potentially make it more focused.

A formal procurement can concentrate on the information that actually needs to be specific to the organization: custom requirements, pricing, contractual provisions, implementation considerations, finalist questions, negotiations, and other issues that deserve individualized attention.

The repetitive information does not have to consume the same portion of the process.

That is an important distinction.

The goal of procurement modernization should not be to eliminate questions.

It should be to stop repeatedly asking questions whose answers could already be available.

PfRs Can Preserve the Strengths of the RFP

Proposal for Requestors (PfRs) are one model for putting this principle into practice.

With a PfR, vendors create structured, standardized, reusable proposals that can be maintained within a secure marketplace and accessed by qualified requestors. Instead of creating the entire information exchange only after a requestor initiates an RFP, portions of the vendor offering already exist.

The information flow begins to change:

Vendors maintain structured offerings -> Requestors discover and compare -> Requestors ask what still needs to be customized

The principles that made RFPs valuable remain.

• Competition still matters.
• Vendor qualification still matters.
• Evaluation criteria still matter.
• Consultant expertise still matters.
• Negotiation still matters.
• Documentation and executive judgment still matter.

What changes is the amount of repetitive information creation required before those activities can produce value.

PfRs can also complement traditional RFPs. A requestor or consultant could use structured vendor information to research the landscape, identify qualified alternatives, and understand meaningful differences before developing a more focused RFP. In other circumstances, sufficiently detailed structured proposals could reduce how much additional information needs to be requested.

The appropriate process will depend on the complexity of the purchase and the needs of the organization.

That flexibility is consistent with the history of procurement itself.

Procurement evolved from simple competitive bids toward proposals because increasingly complex purchases required a more capable mechanism. The next evolution does not need to discard the proposal. It can improve how proposal information is created, maintained, discovered, and evaluated.

Good Procurement Principles Do Not Need to Change

The history of the RFP is not a story about an outdated process that somehow survived too long.

It is the story of a highly successful procurement mechanism adapting to a problem that simpler forms of competitive bidding could not adequately solve.

Organizations needed a procurement process capable of supporting:

• Competition without reducing every purchasing decision to price.
• Different vendor approaches to solving the same problem.
• Defined requirements and evaluation criteria.
• Negotiation, expertise, and professional judgment.
• A documented record of how important purchasing decisions were made.

Those needs remain.

What has changed is the technological environment in which procurement can meet them.

Information no longer needs to be recreated simply because a new procurement has begun. Vendor offerings can be maintained and updated. Structured information can make comparison easier. Search can improve vendor discovery. Technology can automate repetitive analysis. Artificial intelligence can assist experts in identifying differences and investigating increasingly large information sets.

None of those capabilities diminishes what the RFP accomplished.

They exist because procurement has another opportunity to evolve.

The most useful question, then, is not whether organizations should abandon RFPs.

It is whether every part of the RFP process remains necessary simply because it was necessary when the process was designed.

Good procurement should preserve competition, fairness, comparability, accountability, and informed judgment.

The mechanism used to achieve those goals can continue changing.

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Rapid Request is developing Proposal for Requestors (PfRs) to preserve the strengths of competitive procurement while making foundational vendor information structured, reusable, and easier for qualified requestors and consultants to discover and compare.