RFOs

RFOs, or Requests for Offers, and Reasons for Outages, are acronyms that share the same abbreviation but refer to distinct concepts in procurement and service management. In incident reporting, RFO commonly stands for Reasons for Outage, while in purchasing it denotes Requests for Offers. The term RFO is thus context dependent.

Requests for Offers are procurement documents used to solicit competitive offers from potential suppliers. They are typically employed when a buyer wants to compare price, delivery schedules, and commercial terms without prescribing every technical detail. An RFO may follow market research or a broader Request for Information (RFI) and often sits between an unfocused invitation and a formal Request for Proposal (RFP). Contents usually include the procurement objective, scope of work, submission instructions, evaluation criteria, timeline, and contract terms. Responses are evaluated against predefined criteria such as cost, capability, risk, and delivery. The process commonly culminates in selecting a preferred supplier and issuing a contract or purchase order, with possible negotiations on price or terms.

Reasons for Outage are documented in incident management and service assurance to explain why an outage occurred. An RFO analyzes the root cause and contributing factors, along with a chronology of events, affected services, and the outage duration. The report typically includes corrective actions taken to restore service, preventive measures to avoid recurrence, and a summary of impact and recovery time. RFOs support transparency with customers, regulatory compliance, and continual improvement through post-incident reviews.

In practice, the meaning of RFO should be inferred from the organizational context, as the two primary usages address different needs—procurement efficiency and incident accountability.