Part 3 Request for Proposal (RFP) (5 marks)

Golden Mile Auto Services (GMAS) is a business that sells a variety of smart automotive products, particularly offering repairs and services to trucking companies that travel long distances around Australia providing transport and logistics services. They want an integrated system to support their six branch shops around Australia as the opportunity arises. They envisage the system will evolve over time and plan to expand to many more locations. Their initial requirements are:

1. Provide a customer relations database with information about products and services purchased, devices left with them for repair (customer details, customer purchase history, problem report, work details, etc.)

2. A marketing system that allows for digital marketing using e-mail, social media, and any other modern marketing techniques. This will use details in the customer relations database but allow other prospective customers details to be entered in an existing GMAS website (not part of this RFP).

3. A stock management system that includes products for sale, parts for use in repairs, automatic ordering from wholesalers. The system must be able to be used for individual locations to find products and parts at other branch locations when necessary. As the company specialises in assisting customers with repairs 24/7 (24 hours a day), the SMS will need to be able to have real-time monitoring and diagnostics of some of their products (e.g. truck parts, truck monitoring devices).

4. Provide reports for management, who may be at any location, of the status of all the above so they can order stock, recruit staff and make other management decisions.

As a software development consultant with knowledge of software procurement, you have been engaged to provide a detailed RFP for this system. Your RFP should use one or more recognised guidelines that you will reference. You may be tempted to go overboard here so try to restrict your RFP to a reasonable size (up to 1000 words maximum). You must seek to strike a balance here. You must be clear enough as to not waste your firm nor the clients time with an unnecessary volume of applications but also the less restrictions the better in an RFP so that the responders can come up with new ideas that you have not imagined so far. Your RFP should not contain excessively technical information about the requested system. 6 Your RFP should allow for some bespoke software development; but it should also clearly be able to consider existing applications, solutions built from components, SaaS solution, other solutions and any combination of these. Your RFP must be clear in its request for the differing categories of software procurement that can exist in an RFP. As you will learn, your RFP must contain: 1. The system description 2. Explanation of how you would evaluate proposals received 3. Explanation of how you would answer questions 4. Any other facts that would ensure proposals are useful to you and worth a suppliers effort to respond to the RFP Note there are many things missing from the above specification that you should add to your RFP. A lot of your RFP will be details that you will need to make up (e.g. who to contact and how). You can use your own information or make up names and other data along the GMAS theme.

There is no need to write in detail, just an outline to let me know how to write, thank you!