In point form, simply summarize key insights on barriers to participate in procurement from the below text at an 8th-grade reading level and provide brief supporting quotes with ID numbers:
0003: Attitudinal – The business cannot complete the work because they are a small business. Organizational – There was no way to speak with anyone about his questions and concerns Attitudinal - The procurement process doesn’t offer preference to diverse suppliers. Some organizations do, but not procurement as a whole Organizational - The capacity to handle the account management process is too demanding for a small business, there are no resources available compared to large suppliers
0004: Generally they’re a pain to complete. Long and labour intensive, a lot of rules you have to follow. In my particular case I’m visually impaired. I’m a slow reader so it can be annoying to navigate through documents and it takes a lot of extra time.
0005: Complex, lengthy, lost in details, multiple layers of admin, technical problems
0006: Capacity for providing accessible formats, lots of leg work, too complex in lingo
0007: Attitudinal barriers, more that as our company grows those are going down, but when we were smaller the issue about yearly revenue and things like that, especially when starting out, are things that prevent small organizations from competing. Organizational – It’s very hard to figure out who the decision-maker is and to communicate what your services are to the right person. RFPs are strictly written so if you have a disability that limits your written abilities you have to hire organizations to right these RFPs for you, and these cost money and can be hard to find, can be scarce. Can be very hard to complete an RFP solely by yourself. Also very rarely are you allowed to present your product or service in a physical real-time way with RFPs, it’s all done through a spreadsheet that you submit to a portal and you might never hear back.
0008: Getting people clearances to go into government buildings for example
0009: Not many because disability is invisible and choose to not advertise it
0010: Complex language, get overwhelmed by all the legalese, no consistency
0011: Barriers -> only if out of scope, more so on the public side (they ask for proof of other work in the public sector)
0012: The quick turnaround required, fast deadline
0013: Discrimination, unconscious bias. Lack of understanding by LPO to maintain good working relationship in process
0014: Organizational, you could do these in 5 pages rather than 5000. Applications can take weeks to get organized, and we don’t have this type of time. Attitudinal/Organizational: I don’t believe people put themselves in our situation and understand the time and work it takes. Attitudinal: When you are a small boutique firm most people don’t see you.
0015: Emotional barriers for sure. Cognitive barriers but we try to manage them. Maybe some organizational barriers as well.
0016: Because I’m a smaller company I don’t have the marketing team behind me. They require really extensive proposals prepared. A lot of the producers I deal with are smaller as well so capacity can be an issue. My hands (disability) can create some challenges sitting at a desk all day.
0017: The application process is more straightforward than getting to the point of finding an RFP that makes sense for me to apply for. It’s easier now if I need to read a tonne of text. Sometimes the people writing the RFPs for technical oriented things aren’t trained in those things, so it can be confusing in that way, but that’s par for the course.
0018: I found it “cognitively inaccessible” to me. Complexity. I took a class with buy social on how to do the process, and left the class still feeling like I don’t want to do it. It seems like it would take me a very long time to figure out and learn, and it isn’t where my priorities are right now.
0019: Experienced attitudinal barriers from a contractor who seemed biased against the size of my business, asked a lot of questions like “can you really do this?” For another contract, I didn’t get work through a large company that had preferred vendors and learned afterward that they seemed to just be going through the motions and choosing their preferred vendor anyway.
0020: Firstly the RFP itself is huge, which means we have to set aside our priorities to complete it. Sometimes they’ll ask for complicated documents that need to be sent. Some are flexible and do it electronically, others want them by mail and that’s a hassle. They want particular deadlines and it’s a learning process. In my history as an engineer I didn’t have to know these things, I’ve had to learn a lot about what a bid is and how that works. With the government it’s very bureaucratic. The RFP tends to be designed by people who are hearing, who don’t understand deaf issues prior, so they say I need an interpreter but they don’t go deeply into that space.
0021: One barrier is that clients think that the RFP is clear but it isn’t. They give you enough info to put together a bid, but not enough to be specific enough to be relevant. Not providing clarity. The other barrier is having capacity to respond to an RFP. Since officially becoming full-time self employed I haven’t been asked or wanted to seek out an RFP. I would have to have a serious conversation with myself about whether it is worth it. It’s a lot of work only to find out you weren’t successful. It’s not necessarily worth the effort.
0022: Qualifying is the main barrier. It’s changed a lot over the last 5 years. With the city being one of our main clients it’s moved from an in-person envelope / public opening style tendering to online / digital procurement. I can see that having a positive effect on people with disabilities in general but at the same time you have to be more fluid with computers and work through all the bidding platforms. It can be difficult to continue doing the work you want to or would want to do against larger companies that can afford to take projects at or near a loss. Because of that, it’s difficult to continue to meet qualifications with work history because the larger companies are completing more projects in order to keep relevance, and because they can afford to do so. Other qualifications like insurance and bonding qualifications can get so high that only the largest of companies could possibly qualify.
0023: I would probably say I don't know, I think the whole process is quite cumbersome, so I don't know if that's a hurdle, or let's just naturally how the process works. But I would say, like, you know, status quo where yeah there are definitely barriers in the sense of, you know just having and the right understanding and education around what the parameters are, and what's expected. Some are RFPs and RFIs are a lot tighter, a lot more defined, and then some are so loose and vague that it's such a heavy lift and time resource that you just kind of wanna say, well, it's not worth my time, but I think it's just I think the ambiguity of a lot of the RFIs, RFPs RFPs I would call it as a barrier. If it was really clearly outlined, I think that would help people entering into them.
0025: Pre-email there weren’t a lot of barriers. It was pretty simple. Now, we basically respond to these RFPs through SAP Ariba and Ariba is a learning curve. Now it’s not bad, but some technological challenges were there initially.
0026: Requirements to show evidence of environmental policies and several other policies that we felt didn’t apply, but also didn’t have, so we would have had to write several policies in order to be able to submit a proposal. Not understand sign language or translation practice or standards makes it difficult to respond because the expectation of what the org thinks they need doesn’t meet reality, so there isn’t much you can do outside of the questions you need to ask them or to provide input on how to write the RFP to get the services they ended.
0028: Well, what large organization, if it means the largest bank or the largest telecom or the largest FMCG company. There is a format, and there are usual questions. We have done it so many times, we're familiar with it. Okay, it is a lot of details to fill in, but it's primarily all the same. Okay, so it takes a lot of time to fill them out. But we understand it's part of the process. So we have, not a lot of difficulty filling out an RFI basically. An RFI, it is straightforward, although it's time consuming. An RFP is a different thing. An RFP meaning, you know, having a specific proposals. And that. Can be frustrating, can be stressful, can be time consuming. And it's can be problematic. Also 80, 90% of ad agency procurement have rather unreasonable requests, they often make very generalized requests as they don't even know hat they need to ask and hope you'll fill in the blanks for them.