What is a Request for Value?
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A Request for Value (RFV) is a one-page document the business owner writes before any supplier is engaged. It states what the purchase must produce and how anyone will know. It is issued alongside the Request for Proposal, never in place of it, and it is the one document in the procurement sequence addressed to the buyer’s own side rather than to the supplier.
Download the RFV template (Word) Read the white paper See the full RFV pack
The five parts of a Request for Value
- The outcomes the purchase must produce, in the organization’s own terms.
- The metrics that will measure them, each with a baseline and a date.
- The conditions that must hold, on both sides, for the outcomes to be reached.
- The evidence a supplier must provide for a value claim to count.
- The criteria by which responses will be compared, decided before the responses arrive.
All five fit on one page. The page is written once, before the market is asked, and it is not revised to fit the answers that come back.
How an RFV differs from an RFI, RFQ and RFP
| Request | What it asks | Addressed to |
|---|---|---|
| RFI, Request for Information | What the market can offer | The supplier |
| RFQ, Request for Quotation | What it will cost | The supplier |
| RFP, Request for Proposal | How the supplier would deliver it | The supplier |
| RFV, Request for Value | What it must produce, and how anyone will know | The buyer’s own side |
The three established requests all face the same direction. Each asks the supplier something and the supplier answers. None of them makes the buyer’s own side write down what the purchase has to produce or how anyone will know, so the definition of success arrives from the only party that wrote one down, the vendor, inside the proposal. At renewal the organization opens a file it never authored. The RFV is the missing step.
Where the RFV sits in the procurement process
The business owner who will live with the outcome writes the page, with Finance, before any vendor is in the room. Procurement attaches it to the RFP. Vendors respond to it in a set format, so that two proposals can be compared against the same definition instead of against each vendor’s own. The contract references the page, and the renewal is tested against it. Nothing else is added to the process; the page changes what the existing steps are measured against.
Who writes it
Not procurement alone. The outcomes, the baseline and the conditions belong to the business owner, because the business owner is the one who has to live with what arrives. Procurement issues the page and holds the process to it. The template on the Guides page is built that way: the first sections are completed internally, and the later sections are what the vendor is told.
What it is not
An RFV does not replace the RFP, and it adds no scoring matrix. It is a page, not a program, and it is adopted one category and one decision at a time. The first one is issued on a single purchase, by the team that owns that purchase, and the objections it draws from vendors arrive once. After that they compete on it.
Its place in The Value Standard
The Request for Value is the first instrument of The Value Standard, the buyer-held standard under which a purchase’s value is defined, committed to, governed and verified. The RFV defines. The Decision Memo commits to that definition. The VIGOR cadence reviews execution against it. The Audit Record says afterward whether the value arrived. Any one of these operating alone breaks the loop, which is why the standard is the loop and not any single document. The RFV is the part a procurement team can issue next Monday; the rest of the standard is what happens once the page exists.
Read more
The Request for Value, the working paper: where the page goes in the process, the incumbent’s objection, attribution, and how to issue the first one, with the one-page form in Appendix A (17 pages, free to download). Guides: the buyer-issued template, the vendor response format and the workbook, free to download, edit and issue under CC BY 4.0, with no sign-up. Glossary: the standard’s terms in one place.
Keep reading: ACT III · Chapter 15: The Value Lattice System · White Papers
Cite this: Brey, Michael (0009-0006-8285-596X) (2026). The Request for Value (RFV): a buyer-issued template pack for defining purchase outcomes before the market is asked. Value Lattice, LLC. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23289822
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