Understanding Bid Factors

The PeopleSoft Strategic Sourcing bid factor function enables you to evaluate events based on factors such as price, warranties offered, lead time, and product quality. Bid factors are questions bidders must answer about their products, services, or company.

You set weightings for each bid factor, letting bidders know how much value you give to that portion of their bid. Price is by default the first bid factor of any buy or sell event. It is required for auction events, and you set a weighting for it. In some events, price might be the most important consideration, so you give it a 70 percent weighting. Or the color of the product might be so significant that you give it a 50 percent weighting.

If the event is an auction, bid factors of type text cannot be weighted. This is because no method is available to automatically score answers that are given in text (for example, answers to a bid factor that says, "Describe your quality processes"). PeopleSoft Strategic Sourcing automatically assigns this a weight of zero, enabling you to collect this useful information without affecting bid scoring. If the event is an RFx (request for quote) or RFI (request for information) event, you can manually score text responses during bid analysis.

You can also create bid factors that you do not display to the bidders, but instead answer during the analysis of the bids. These bid factors can be for subjective responses such as current business relationship or interview results.

You, the creator, can see the scores and can even edit the weighting percentages of the bid factors to consider what-if scenarios for RFx and RFI events.

You can also create bid factor groups that contain multiple bid factors. When you add a bid factor group to an event, the system automatically assigns the bid factors that are assigned to that group to the event.

This section discusses:

  • Header bid factors vs. line bid factors.

  • Total costing modeling.

  • Scoring vs. weighting.

  • Line weighting vs. bid factor weighting.

  • Default rule assignment.

  • Ad hoc bid factors.

  • Required or mandatory response designation.

  • Price components.

  • Contract clauses.

  • Contract agreements.

  • Bid factor groups.

  • Automatic bid factor population with queries.