Evaluating Responses and Recording Your Decision

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Once your Request has closed and you have received Supplier responses, you can choose from a variety of evaluation methods to support your final decision.

To access these, you must first unlock the Responses. This will prevent further changes being made, including the ability to re-open the Request to give suppliers more time to respond.

Your access to evaluation methods will depend on your organisation's VendorPanel settings. The methods are:

  • Quick Select: Allows Buyers to simply 'Select' or 'Decline' each Supplier response. This method is appropriate for evaluations undertaken offline or external to VendorPanel. It's good practice to provide a reason for your decision for the suppliers reference.

  • Evaluation Matrix: This method uses a matrix to access supplier's responses against a set of criteria. Cost can be provided an automatic score, but you as the Buyer can create criteria and weighting to aid your evaluation.

  • Multi-Party Evaluation: The Multi-Party Evaluation (MPE) method is appropriate for evaluations involving multiple Evaluators. The Buyer configures the evaluation criteria and then invites Evaluators to review the Supplier responses. These Evaluators can be grouped into ‘teams’ and do not need to be VendorPanel users.

  • Advanced Evaluations: Advanced Evaluations is a highly flexible tool used to conduct Multi-Party Evaluations. It has a rich set of features including criteria management, individual and consensus scoring and external evaluator invitations.

For all four evaluation methods, private notes, documents and feedback for suppliers can be attached to each decision.

You can select multiple successful suppliers and you also choose to decline all responses.

Choosing an evaluation method

There are multiple places where an evaluation method can be chosen.

During the creation of your Request:

On the final step of the Request Wizard titled 'Save & Post' and option to choose an evaluation method is made available.

Use the dropdown menu to choose one of the available options before posting.

Note: You are not locked to the option you select during the creation of your Request. If you wish to change the evaluation method, this can be done after the Request has closed and responses have been unlocked.

Through the additional options menu:
Against your Request, you can click the three vertical dots and select 'Change this method'. Simply select the evaluation method you wish to use to evaluate responses and save your choice.