Examples of Analyzing Supplier Responses

There are several ways you can analyze supplier responses to your negotiation. You can view and analyze responses both while the negotiation is open and receiving responses, and after the negotiation ends. You can also view the Automatic Award Recommendation generated by the application.

The Monitor Negotiation page provides you with a centralized location to obtain information about all the responding suppliers and their responses while the negotiation is still open. You can obtain information at the response level, or drill down to the line level. Using the displays available, you can easily view competing responses and spot any trends over time. Also, the Response History page lets you view the responses in the order they were received. If appropriate, you can disqualify any responses from the Response History page. Once you have closed the negotiation, there are many tools and displays available to you to support the analysis of responses.

• Scores

  If requirements were defined for the negotiation, automatically scored requirements have already been assigned scores by the application. If there are manually scored requirements, you or an authorized member of the collaboration team can enter scores.

  If the negotiation is a two stage RFQ, you must evaluate the technical requirement responses first. Then for the suppliers who pass the technical evaluation, you can evaluate the commercial responses.

• Using knockout criteria and shortlisting

  Once you have scored your requirements, you can apply a knockout criteria (if one was defined for the negotiation) to eliminate any responses which don't meet or surpass the minimum score value.

  By default, all responding suppliers are placed on the short list. However, you can remove any suppliers from further award consideration by changing their shortlist status.

  If you have a large number of supplier responses, using knockout criteria and shortlisting is a good way to reduce the number of responses for analysis.

• Analytic charts and graphs

  There are several graphs available to you when making your award decisions. Some are at the response level, some at the line level. These displays are updated in real time, allowing you to enter provisional award decisions and then change the values and view the new graph results until you obtain the exact decision you need. For charts that deal with requirement scores, you should enter values for any manually scored requirements before generating the charts. For charts that display savings amounts, you should enter provisional award values first.

• Spreadsheet analysis

  You can download the responses into a spreadsheet and view and analyze the responses offline. You can enter your award decisions into the spreadsheet and upload it back to the applications. Offline analysis is useful when there are many negotiation lines to be considered or there are many supplier responses.

Scenario

Office Supplies, Inc. is conducting an RFQ on several new items they want to add to their inventory. Mary Wang, the buyer responsible for awarding the negotiation has been checking the responses coming in and is now ready to enter her award decisions

Mary closes the negotiation. For one of the negotiation lines, she sees there are many responses, some including alternate lines, so she and other collaboration team members view and score any manually scored requirements.

She applies the knockout criteria. This removes most of the supplier responses for this line. She views the list of remaining suppliers and decides that no more suppliers need to be removed, so she does not change any of the remaining suppliers' shortlist status.

For the remaining suppliers, she generates the supplier level displays by selecting the suppliers and clicking Award. She sees that there is a group of responses that offer substantial savings, but that they are very close in price. She decides to split the award among the suppliers, so she generates the line level displays to decide the best amount to award to each supplier.

Scenario

Brown county operations publishes a two-stage RFQ to contract for IT services for a new mass transit department. The category manager, James Sanchez, creates the two-stage RFQ document. He uses the specifications imparted by the new department head to document the technical specifications in two requirement sections that are identified as technical. He also identifies the financial information required for the legally mandated quote process in a requirement section labeled Commercial. After completing the RFQ document, he publishes the negotiation.

Once the specified time period to receive supplier quotes ends, Mr. Sanchez closes the negotiation. He then unlocks and unseals the technical requirements. The designated evaluators for the technical requirements view and score the responses to the technical requirement sections. Mr. Sanchez shortlists the supplier quotes with the best responses to the technical requirements.

Mr. Sanchez then unlocks the commercial requirements. The designated financial evaluators view and score the responses to the financial requirement sections for the shortlisted quotes.

After the technical, commercial, any additional requirements, quote prices and all other negotiation response information have been evaluated. Mr. Sanchez makes the award decisions.