Evaluate the tenders

Note: In all of my projects we evaluated the written tenders first, then the presentations. More often than not step 2 yielded a substantial change in our evaluation results. This can be taken as a hint, that written statements are not very well suited for these purposes.

Rules and Notes

R1: Always check: Has the supplier really anticipated the specific problem?

Note that it can be hard to find the individual information among the heaps of tandard text in a witten tender

R2: Again have the the evaluations tasks divided and assigned to different team members

R3: Evaluate the categories {form, content, sensed quality}

Note: For evaluation, you can something similar to Simple Solid Decision Making. We once used the following simpler, but less solid scheme:

count: small and large problems with the tender's text, quastions not answered, good points
give school grades
build a ranking

Your provider management or purchasing dept maybe can supply you with a spredsheet for that.

R4 [too many suppliers on the list for presentations]: use ranking

R5: Encourange communication among the evaluation team

R6: explicitly allow "subjective" statements (the whole evaluation is kind of subjective).

This works towards keeping subjectiveness out of the other criteria

R7: [lots of questions by suppliers]: give a chance to improve the tender

Do that by gathering all questions anonymously , answer them and send them back to the suppliers. Or, better, improve your spec and resubmit it)

R8: [doubts whether the statements about the past are true]: check their references.

Be suspicious if references call YOU. Be suspicious if a reference uses an email address from Yahoo!, Hotmail, … Get a company phone number and call their main number instead of the references' individual number. Do a web search on the company's name and check their website. Call ALL references.

R9: Mind that decision making is not independent from your emotions

recent research

Costs, Savings

What does it take to implement those rules? What does it give?

Side effects

Is there anything that happend or will happen as one implements the rules? This relates to both wanted and unwanted effects ('unwanted' does not imply 'negative').