1. Using DataFox for Procurement
  2. Best Practices for Scoring

Best Practices for Scoring

Here are some best practices to keep in mind while building criteria for your score.

Learn the Basics

  • Learn how to create at least one of the key types of criteria, such as a prebuilt list, signals data, firmographic data, and more. For details, see Set Up Scoring.

  • Before you start setting up your scoring criteria, do your research. Build a scoring model that meets your organization’s unique requirements.

Analyze and Reiterate

  • Use your research to analyze and understand your organization’s priorities. Identify risk elements that are most important to your organization so that you can build a personalized model. For example, for your organization, you identify the criteria company acquisition as a greater risk than leadership change. In this case, ensure that you assign a lower weight to the company acquisition criteria than to the leadership change criteria.

  • After you set up your criteria and publish your scores for the first time, analyze your scores and improve them.

    • Consider aspects such as geography, industry, revenue, and so on. Let’s say you assigned a score of 45 points for suppliers that have a revenue of more than 5 billion USD. When you publish the results, you notice that suppliers based out of FATF monitored countries also show high scores because they meet the revenue criteria. You decide to add another criteria and assign a weight of -60 points to suppliers based out of FATF monitored countries.

    • Preview your scores in the distribution chart on the Preview Scores tab. The chart might indicate issues with your scoring that you might need to address. For example, if you see that most of your suppliers have negative scoring, you know there’s something wrong with your scoring model.

    • Define a scoring model that assigns each supplier with a base score. This helps you identify suppliers with high risks easily. Negative score indicates that the supplier is a high-risk one. The lower the score, the higher the risk.

  • Review and normalize your criteria for supplier variation. For example, if a company had litigations recently, its score might be low even though this might be a nonissue considering its financial standing. To normalize the scoring, you can add another criteria for companies with over 5 billion USD revenue and assign a positive weight. This balances the negative weight and moves the company to the lower risk category.

Share and Update

After you publish your criteria, have your teams use scores to identify high-risk suppliers. Collect their feedback and adjust your criteria set as required.