The requirement to give oral proposal presentations has been important for decades, but the nature of oral proposals fundamentally changed with simplification in contracting during the mid 1990s. Two important results of the changes in orals were as follows:
- Proposal orals that had been free form became highly structured, usually having specific requirements as to length, graphics, content, and who would serve as presenters.
- Orals became much more important in determining the winner, sometimes even accounting for 40 – 60% of the total evaluation point score.
