Vendor Evaluation Tools for RFP Consultants

Many consulting engagements involve vendor evaluation, tender or RFP projects. SupplierSelect has been used by consultants since its conception and this experience has strongly influenced its design.

SupplierSelect saves time and money, enabling fewer consultants to manage more projects. Online collaboration provides clients with real time insight into the vendor evaluation process, helping to gain trust and win more business. In many cases, SupplierSelect enables consultants to develop new products and services such as industry benchmarking or ongoing vendor monitoring.

• Efficient Knowledge Reuse
• Rich RFP Questions
• Sector Benchmarking
• Centralized, Audited Vendor Communication
• Accuracy and Evaluation
• Working with Clients

Efficient Knowledge Reuse

Clients hire RFP consultants for their expertise in a specific purchase category. These specialist consultants tend to run similar projects for different clients. SupplierSelect enables such consultants to maximise their reuse of knowledge and material between projects. RFPs are created online, and can be copied between projects or built up to form a structured library of RFP templates. Questions can be shared between projects, so RFP respondents can import their answers from previous projects. Where answers have already been scored, the scores are copied across in the background.

For large RFPs, the time savings in creating and evaluating RFPs can be dramatic.

Of course each client will have unique requirements so SupplierSelect enables you to customize new RFPs without breaking backwards compatibility. New sections, questions or criteria can be added to the project without affecting weighting or scoring calculations.

Rich RFP Questions

Most RFP management tools enforce a rigid question structure which struggles to support the richly structured RFPs that experienced consultants require. With SupplierSelect you can create questions of any layout and any combination of fields. These can then be structured into a hierarchy of sections and subsections, nested to any depth. This hierarchical structure supports a logical and flexible weighting model.

Benchmarking

Consultants issuing repeated RFPs in the same field accumulate a huge amount of data and knowledge about the sector. SupplierSelect enables this knowledge to be leveraged to provide insights to all participants in the sector.

Vendors have a very great interest interest in seeing how they stack up against the competition. SupplierSelect's flexible scoring makes it easy to generate reports comparing a single vendor against their peers.

SupplierSelect also supports &Reference Projects&. These are a special case of RFP projects where the vendors can update their data at any time - i.e. from from the traditional RFP issue/submit cycle. This enables vendors to maintain a standard set of RFP answers that can be re-used for each newly issued RFP.

Reference Project work well in a benchmarking context because reports can be based on near real-time information.

Centralized, Audited Vendor Communication

In a fair and transparent RFP process, all vendors should receive exactly the same information so the playing field is level. Each project in SupplierSelect has its own message board. When a vendor posts a question it can only be seen by the evaluation team. The evaluator can compose and answer and click "Reply to all Respondents", and the answer is visible to everyone. Automated email notifications keep everyone abreast of what's going on.

Accuracy and Time Saving

Scoring an RFP, whilst mathematically simple, can become error prone when collating information into spreadsheets. Especially where there is a hierarchical questionnaire structure with multiple weighting sets and scoring sets. SupplierSelect automates all scoring calculations, allowing the rfp consultant to focus on the analysis and on the client.

Working with Clients

Consultants often wish to provide clients with access to the RFP website. However, with most RFx software, this would involve granting the client access to all of the projects run by the rfp consultant - including those relating to other clients.

SupplierSelect addresses this via the concept of "Participants".

Each project in SupplierSelect has a list of Participants - these are organizations granted access to the evaluators side of a project. Each participant is granted a role which determines the permissions they have in that project.

For more information read our case studies on consultants issuing RFPs or email consultants@supplierselect.com