Many companies use a formal Request for Information (RFI), Request for Proposal (RFP), and/or Request for Quotation (RFQ) process to collect information about commercially available PDM and PLM software solutions. For many companies, this formal technique is an effective means of first building consensus from all internal PLM stakeholders, and for collecting information from vendors in a consistent format.
Aras has received hundreds of RFP's over the years. We'e extracted the questions and the Aras answers from many of these and posted them in our On-Line RFP.
We think Robust Decisions has created an interesting tool for PLM selection committees to use. It allows a side-by-side PLM software comparison between all the current PLM software applications. This would also be useful for grading the result of RFP replies, or even in building consensus on the rankings of PLM features and functions.