I had to work on an RFP because all our pre-sales guys were too busy with other projects. The RFP had 50+ questions, which is typical. What realy bothered me was the printing!
The RFP was issued by a university looking for a project management solution. Yet they had asked for 5 copies of the material printed and Fedex’ed to them by the deadline. What I do not understand is this: why is a university, which is supposed to represent the future, asking for so much printed paper?
Printing hundreds and hundreds of pages, including the supporting material they asked for, took so much of our assistants’ time. And some of the screenshots did not look so good on paper anyway! But what the hell!
So we spent 2 to 3 hours printing, binding and packaging—5 copies, no less—and then we paid Fedex to deliver this large bulk of paper, which probably no one will read in its entirety.
We could have just emailed the same content; it would have taken 2 to 3 hours less work, and we would have been able to invest an extra day on responding to the questions instead of printing, packing and shipping.
This is a university for heaven’s sake!
#1 by R. Bruce at May 14th, 2007
Hi Rudolph,
Yup, welcome to our world. I have a small Document Management firm the delivers Solutions to mid sized firms. This is a prime example of where people get stuck and cant see the forest for the trees. You gave one example. Think about their student records that must be kept for 99 years. They are probably stored in a dark damp basement somewhere on campus, real safe huh? They are supposedly leading us into the future but think about how many trees each University goes through in one year. Think about the hours wasted in a company that has say 5,000 employees when half of them make copies numerous times per day. 80% of that waste can be gotten rid of by implementing even a basic Document Management System. ROI’s even on large enterprise systems can be as little as 6-8 months. I’ll stop rambling now and climb off my soap box.