Sourcing & Procurement

Most sourcing exercises share elements of a generic process, whether the project is to shortlist candidates, select a supplier or to review an existing supplier:

1. Define requirements for the new good or service
2. Identify criteria which can be used to assess a candidate's ability to deliver good or services to meet these requirements
3. Frame the criteria as questions, wherever possible using closed questions
4. Structure the questions in sections and (if necessary) subsections, assigning weightings according to the relative importance of the underlying criteria
5. Identify potential candidates
6. Issue the questions to the candidates and collect their responses
7. Read and score responses
8. Apply weightings and calculate total scores
9. Compare and select respondents

SupplierSelect helps with steps 3-8 of this process. Question and questionnaire libraries share knowledge throughout an organisation - slashing the time it takes to draft a new questionnaire. Graphical tools simplify the maths of weighting big, structured questionnaires. Pluggable directory implementations give all users access to the same set of suppliers. Web based questionnaires make it easier for anyone with a browser to respond. Scores can are entered inline. Scoring comments and a full audit trail enable groups to work on the same set of responses in parallel. Automated weighting calculations reduce errors.

Of course the really tricky bit is identifying requirements, framing questions, and decyphering responses. We don't see that these aspects can be helped by software, so SupplierSelect restricts itself to automating those parts of the process which are low value, administrative, and otherwise error prone.

Read more about SupplierSelect in the feature tour.

Procurement Regulations

Many procurement projects, especially in the government sector or other regulated environments, must comply with strict rules concerning the conduct of the tendering process. SupplierSelect helps enforce and document many of the most common rules:

1. Audit Trail: Every action is logged. In the case of question responses, scores or scoring comments, a complete change history is maintained of all previous values. Thus complete transparency is provided as to when RFPs were issued and when they were first read or scored.
2. Supplier Feedback: When a supplier's bid is rejected they may have the right (e.g. under EU rules) to a detailed report indicating how they scored relative to the other applicants. SupplierSelect makes it easy to generate a report providing this information.
3. Same information to all Suppliers: SupplierSelect's messaging subsystem can be configured to disallow private communication between the Buyer and one supplier. So, when a suppliers has a query about question 2.3.14, the answer must be made visible to all suppliers.
4. Same Evaluation Period: another common guideline is that all bids should be opened at the same time. For EU public sector projects using paper documents this requires a witnessed ceremony where the bid envelopes are all opened at the same moment. With SupplierSelect, one project sector will guarantee that the Buyer cannot view any response information until the exact deadline date.