Identify and Manage Technology Needs, Compare Vendors, and Find Solutions
Olive is a new way of identifying and managing needs for buying solutions. It’s more innovative, collaborative, and accurate than RFI/RFQ (asking questions or asking for information) or RFP (identifying use cases and asking for a proposal on how to solve them).
Our approach is based on the idea that requirements management has historically been used for building solutions, but why shouldn’t it be used for buying solutions?
Spend up to 66% Less Time on Enterprise Software Selection
Building a Digital Transformation Roadmap
Olive guides you through your digital transformation journey. We want to help you think long-term by identifying any overlap in company-wide opportunities or projects that will solve long-term goals for the organization. With the project stages dashboard, you can input all the transformation initiatives you plan to implement over the next 2-3 years. You don’t need to work on all of them immediately, but you have visibility into your current and future initiatives here. Building out a longer-term strategy means you can proactively prevent siloed working by having visibility into opportunities across departments that one solution may solve and approach your digital transformation initiatives in a more strategic and agile way. Inputting all your projects here means you can easily find overlapping, intertwined, or complementary opportunities and discover more streamlined ways to solve recurring challenges.
Discovery and Understanding of Organizational Goals
Identifying all current, future, and potential technology needs builds a deep understanding of the organization’s overarching goals. Documenting high-level digital transformation objectives, current state, desired future state, and intended benefits across the organization in one place for everyone to reference centralizes all digital transformation needs and ideas in one place. This discovery sets the stage for all technology initiatives and keeps all evaluations and decisions aligned with organizational goals. Olive’s surveys facilitate a seamless collaboration process, helping capture and catalog feedback from key organizational stakeholders.
Identifying and Prioritizing Needs in Collaboration with Stakeholders
A major obstacle in effectively facilitating and expediting digital transformation is the ability to accurately identify and prioritize stakeholder needs. Many digital transformation initiatives fail due to insufficient stakeholder engagement and feedback. Olive provides a process that allows stakeholders to easily identify and prioritize detailed requirements to ensure that their needs are met, rather than asking solution providers what their solutions do or how their solutions could potentially meet a list of high-level use cases. Olive’s surveys make it easy to collaborate with stakeholders across the business to ensure all requirements are collected and rated based on company-wide needs. Internal project managers can use this information to create and prioritize requirements and allow subject matter experts to add and prioritize their own requirements directly in Olive.
In-app messaging eliminates the need for time-consuming meetings and emails by allowing stakeholders to collaborate on and refine individual requirements directly within Olive.
Communicate and Collaborate with Vendors
It often takes months to create an RFI or RFP and once it is sent out, if additional needs or use cases are identified after the fact, it is incredibly difficult and time-consuming to make updates once vendors have started their response process. Also, there is little or no visibility into the response process itself until responses are actually received.
Olive provides an iterative agile approach that allows early vendor engagement, even before all needs may be specified, refined, or known. As key stakeholders and collaborators create and rank their most important requirements, vendors can be invited to begin their responses, even if all needs have not yet been identified or defined.
This provides several benefits:
- First, in the traditional RFP/RFI process, vendors usually perform some win/loss and revenue predictions up front to decide whether or not to respond to that RFI/RFP, as these responses can take up weeks or months of dedicated resource time. This creates the threat that the best solution may eliminate themselves up front. Olive’s agile, iterative approach minimizes the initial time required for vendors, encouraging those who may not otherwise respond to do so.
- Second, initial vendor responses may generate new ideas and requirements that may have never otherwise surfaced.
- Finally, it allows early insight into the vendors who will or will not be able to meet the initial, most important requirements effectively, allowing for early disqualification of certain vendors and saving time for all parties involved.
Shortlisting Vendors and Solution Selection
Each iteration within Olive will elevate certain vendors and disqualify others. Automated insights and scoring will quickly surface the vendors who best meet the organization’s needs, reducing the technology procurement and evaluation process by weeks, if not months. Stakeholders can flag specific short-listed vendor features and functionality that they would like to see demoed, allowing hyper-focussed demos tailored to specific vendor solutions and how they can meet organizational needs. Once vendor demos are complete, stakeholders can comment on each requirement regarding how well they think vendors have demonstrated that they can fulfill them and modify their scoring accordingly.
Once a vendor solution has been selected, Olive automatically provides proof of due diligence by time-stamping all stakeholder and vendor engagement, including all organizational needs and how they were identified, what solution best meets those needs and why, how the selected solution will fulfill them, and why that solution is the best fit.
