Essay Question: Background: We already have 1000 units of Electronic Video Systems installed on our trains. We want to obtain 500 more units. We put out a request for proposal from the company that we already have the systems from as well as their competitors. We received the quotes back and eventually decide to choose the current company anyways. Problem: We have portions of our tracks that other railroad companies use as well. They utilize the competitor's electronic video systems which our users are not familiar with. To alleviate this problem, we want to obtain 1 system from each competitor so that we can look into the system to understand how it works and how to use it so that we can train our users. We reach out to the competitors and all but one respond with a quote. ABC company has 2 reservations about the request. 1.) We used the previous bid process to beat down their competitors prices and 2.) they are afraid that we would discover proprietary information about their system during our tests which could be leaked. Write a brief email to ABC company using the above reasoning to encourage them to reconsider their decision concerning this request.
