The RFP process or Request For Proposal is a critical aspect in initiating a business transaction and business leaders understand it too well to be lenient towards a single aspect of it. It is a tiresome job that requires consistency and tactful response management skills. Depending on the volume of business it can run into lakhs of emails and thousands of pages of information gathered through market research. A good RFP software can come in handy as it streamlines the RFP process and centralizes stakeholder input. RFPIO is an AI-enabled Enterprise Response Management Platform helping companies extract rare insights by analyzing historically-answered RFPs. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Manish Bafna, VP of Technology, RFPIO.

1.What were your company's missions and objectives at inception? Tell us about your journey since.

Founded in 2015, RFPIO is headquartered in Portland (US) with strong roots in India (Coimbatore). The idea at the initial stages was to make Tender (RFP) Response processes less challenging. With our acquisition of RFP360, we are expanding our capabilities to both the issuing and responding sides of the business. Our platform is used by over 2,000 companies across dozens of industries with over 2,50,000 users worldwide.

RFPIO's proven track record includes a clientele in which 15 percent are Fortune 500 companies, apart from associations with global giants like Google Cloud, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Microsoft. 

In July 2018, we received a $25 million inward investment from K1 Capital, an industry-leading investor.

2.How does your company uncover patterns using Analytics and Machine Learning?

We deal with a tremendous amount of text data. We apply machine learning and state-of-the-art natural language processing algorithms to deduce patterns and unravel latent insights in data, across several use cases. Notably, for our flagship re-ranking solution, we devised a proprietary ML algorithm that helps find the best response to RFPs by using historically-answered RFPs. 

3.How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes through the adoption of your company's technological innovations?

Research suggests that 80 percent of sales efforts amount to only 20 percent of revenue. Our team began the journey with the intention of providing a simple, trustworthy solution that will provide companies with a defining competitive edge in the market.

Automation isn't just about automating routine tasks to save time. The right application of technology helps in decision-making, with data points in mind. Tender Process Automation is becoming a game-changer for organizations that aspire for higher win rates in businesses.

Our products take care of Issue and Response Management holistically. Our sorting features like Autograph help in getting documents digitally signed by multiple authorities at once. Our Content Analysis module validates proposals against the requirements defined by customers.

AI-enabled RFP automation eliminates knowledge dependencies, as it comes with centralized knowledge repositories. It allows core teams to focus on the quality of RFx responses, which leads to higher productivity and increased estimated annual savings on time and effort.\

4.How does your company's strategy facilitate the transformation of an enterprise? 

By embracing automation, both responders and issuers can eliminate redundancies and focus on overall business objectives. Our solutions help enterprises embrace efficient collaboration and modern automation, thus unlocking the true revenue potential of embracing the best of Tender Process Automation.

5.Where do you see growth coming in the Tender Process Automation sector?

Customers from healthcare, telecommunication, technology, and business services predominantly need a solution like ours. Essentially, any business that performs B2B transactions can benefit from Tender Process Automation.

6.What is your roadmap for the Tender Process Automation market?

We have grown consistently since our inception, sometimes even doubling our revenue in a calendar year. Most of our customers are enterprises that operate across countries. Our products have reached users in more than 50 nations, and our user base is continuing to expand at a brisk rate. 

The impact of AI-driven technologies is spurring businesses to optimize their sales cycle. The primary reason to switch to Tender Process Automation is to improve the Sales Cycle. It allows individual proposal responders to focus on quality responses, rather than attending to lengthy administrative processes.

7.Can you highlight a few use cases in which Analytics has benefitted your organization?

At RFPIO, ML/AI plays a major role. We leverage ML/AI across several use cases. Some of our interesting use cases include our re-ranking solution, document-shredding, summarisation, and smart autocompletion of RFPs. Our product also comes with the capabilities of intelligent understanding of Word and Excel documents to extract RFP-related information, answer using snippet extraction from responses, and many other automation-enabling features.

8.How can businesses efficiently extract value from data, without increasing cost and complexity?

Leveraging data appropriately adds incredible competitive advantages to businesses. It is of significant importance to identify potential data that is related to use cases for organizations to realize its underlying value.

We have had successful instances where as a business we have discovered several latent insights by deducing patterns from historical data, which would otherwise have gone unnoticed.

Setting up the right data architecture and efficient infrastructure to handle data-related activities at scale is key to handling data without increasing complexity.