Mar 23, 2018 History of EZ-RFP
By Ryan Keintz
History of EZ-RFP
Yesterday we announced the release of our EZ-RFP tool available to Mover2Mover subscribers. Originally called Corporate Proposal Responder or CPR, EZ-RFP was one of the tools I had in mind when I founded PricePoint. I'm excited to be able to share this tool with our client partners.
Much of the most important work experience of my career was the few years that I served as the international pricing manager at the global HQ of one of the industry’s largest brands. The majority of my time was spent coordinating and constructing our company’s responses to the pricing component of a seemingly never-ending stream of corporate RFPs. Over time, I became highly skilled at this, largely due to developing myself into an “Excel blackbelt” (my life changed the day I discovered the VLOOKUP function).
Even as my Excel skill grew, I estimate the typical medium-to-large RFP required 10-20 hours of my time (sometimes more), plus countless hours imposed on my agents who had to continually respond to my spreadsheet template rate requests. Over 90% of our organization’s RFP-dedicated time was focused solely on the “heavy-lifting” of gathering, compiling, and calculating rates. There was very little time for valuable activities such as price benchmarking, strategic review, etc. By the time we finally pulled all the pricing together, we had to get the results out the door and move on to the next RFP.
In contrast with PricePoint EZ-RFP, our objective is to reduce the typical 10-20 hours of processing time to 1-2 hours (or even 20 minutes). This is possible by leveraging our growing instant-pricing database of 700+ agents across 150+ countries into a user interface flexibly designed for corporate RFPs of all shapes and sizes. The significant admin savings can be dropped to the bottom line, or directed towards more worthwhile endeavors. Such opportunities include spending more time on strategic review and scenario comparison.
We are eager to share this major competitive advantage with our client partners.
Founder and President. After a career pricing for the largest international movers, Ryan observed that price manipulation was a more critical success factor than customer service or logistical expertise. He created PricePoint to fix a broken system.