How to Write an ERP RFP in the UAE: A Practical Template and the Questions That Matter

Most ERP RFPs we receive in Dubai follow the same pattern. A long spreadsheet of features with a column for "Yes, No, Customisation", a request for a price, and a two-week deadline. Every vendor ticks yes on almost everything, the prices are not comparable because the scopes are not comparable, and the buyer ends up choosing on the demo and the handshake. Then the project runs into exactly the problems the RFP never asked about.

This guide is the RFP structure we recommend to UAE companies selecting an ERP, whether the shortlist is Odoo, SAP Business One, NetSuite, Dynamics 365 Business Central or something else. It is written for the finance head, operations director or owner who has been handed the job, and it is built to produce proposals you can actually compare.

The RFP structure

A workable RFP for a mid-sized UAE company runs fifteen to twenty-five pages and has eight sections. The table sets them out with what each one is for.

Scenarios beat checklists

The single change that improves an RFP most is replacing the feature list with scenarios. A scenario is a short description of something that actually happens in your business, with sample data, and the outcome you expect. Examples from recent UAE projects:

• A customer in a designated free zone orders 40 items from three warehouses; two items are out of stock; show the order, the partial delivery, the back order, the invoice with the correct VAT treatment and the stock position afterwards.
• A supplier invoice in EUR arrives for a container cleared last month; show the landed cost allocation to 25 products and the effect on average cost and margin.
• A construction project has a progress certificate at 60 percent with 10 percent retention and an advance recovered pro rata; show the invoice, the retention ledger and the VAT.
• Month-end for two entities: show the consolidated profit and loss in AED, the VAT return draft for each, and the intercompany reconciliation.
• An employee leaves mid-month; show the final settlement calculation, the WPS file and the accounting entries.

Ask each vendor to demonstrate every scenario live, on a copy of your data, with the consultants who would actually deliver the project driving the system. Record the sessions. A vendor who declines, or who sends a salesperson to demo from a script, has told you what you need to know.

The UAE requirements to state explicitly

Vendors from outside the region, and some inside it, will assume compliance is a localisation pack that someone else handles. Write it down and make them answer each point.

1. UAE VAT: tax codes for standard, zero-rated, exempt, out of scope and reverse charge; the FTA return format; designated zone handling; VAT on imports by reverse charge.
2. E-invoicing: the FTA mandate begins in phases from 1 January 2027 for larger businesses and from 1 July 2027 for others, with invoices reaching the FTA through an Accredited Service Provider. Ask which ASP connector is proposed, whether it is live elsewhere and who maintains it.
3. Corporate tax: the chart of accounts and reporting needed to prepare the return, and entity-level reporting for groups.
4. Payroll and WPS: if HR is in scope, WPS file generation, gratuity accruals, leave and the UAE labour law rules.
5. Arabic: bilingual invoices and contracts where customers or authorities require them; Arabic interface if the team needs it.
6. Entities: mainland and free zone companies, intercompany, consolidation.
7. KSA: ZATCA Phase 2 integration for any Saudi entity, now or planned.

The questions that matter

Beyond the scenarios, a short list of written questions separates serious proposals from brochures. Ask for answers in writing and hold the vendor to them in the contract.

• Who are the named consultants on this project, what have they delivered in the last two years, and what percentage of their time is allocated to us?
• What is explicitly excluded from the fixed price, and what are the assumptions behind it?
• How many customisations do you expect, and how do they survive upgrades?
• Who cleanses the legacy data, and how many reconciled test migrations are included?
• What does post go-live support cover, for how long, and what are the annual support terms after that?
• Give three references in the UAE of similar size and sector that we may call, including one project that had problems and how they were handled.
• If the project slips, what happens to the price and to the team?

The last two questions are the useful ones. A partner who can describe a difficult project calmly is more credible than one who claims none. Our analysis of why ERP projects fail in the GCC is largely a list of what these questions would have caught.

Commercial terms and the five-year total

Ask for a fixed price for the defined scope, with every assumption listed, day rates for work outside it and a written change process. Ask for payment milestones tied to deliverables you can verify, such as a signed-off blueprint, a reconciled test migration, user acceptance and a stable period after go-live, rather than to calendar dates. Then ask for a five-year total: implementation, licences or subscriptions with the renewal uplift stated, hosting, the e-invoicing connector, annual support and any third-party apps. Proposals that look cheap at year one often converge or reverse by year five. Our guide to ERP cost in the UAE gives the ranges to sanity-check against.

Scoring that vendors cannot game

Decide the weights before the proposals arrive and share them in the RFP. A reasonable split for a mid-sized UAE company is scenario demonstrations 35 percent, team and references 25 percent, five-year cost 20 percent, compliance and integration 10 percent, and contract terms 10 percent. Score each vendor independently by two or three people, then compare. The scores rarely surprise, but the discussion of where they differ is where the decision gets made properly.

How Kaido approaches it

When a company asks us to help with an RFP, we spend the first day on the scenarios rather than on the document. We sit with the process owners, pick the fifteen things that happen every week and the five that go wrong every quarter, and write them up with real data. The document almost writes itself after that, and the demos become a test rather than a show.

When we respond to an RFP, we answer the scenarios on the client's data, name the consultants and show their allocation, and give a fixed price with the assumptions on one page, because that is the proposal we would want to receive. If you are earlier in the process and want to understand what an implementation involves before writing the RFP, our implementation guide for the UAE sets out the phases, the roles and the decisions that each stage requires.