SupplierSelect helps buyers (”contracting authorities”) to comply with procurement regulations by providing a number of project settings which change the behaviour of the RFP. Many of these are driven by the European Union’s directives on public sector contracting. We’ve now added a new setting - “Expose Weightings to Respondents”.

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When running a big RFP, it’s very easy to become lost in the vendor and scoring information that is accumulated. SupplierSelect works to develop new tools to help manage this information. A recently developed report helps to drill down to the questions that most differentiate vendors responses.

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Answer Reports enable RFP authors to create reports which collate vendor data. Individual data points can be picked from RFP questions to create a compact report for side by side comparison of vendor responses.

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Scoring data from RFP / RFx projects is used in different ways by different organizations. It can be statistically manipulated, analyzed or used to produce charts and reports. To facilitate these activities SupplierSelect provides a way of exporting scoring data for maximum flexibility. This is the “Raw Data Export” report reached under Project -> Reports using the “Raw Data” link under “Analysis”.

This article describes using Excel’s Pivot Table functionality to analyze data thus exported. The screenshot below shows how the  sample dataset appears when it is first loaded in Excel:

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Summary:

1. The “best” vendor is the one most suited to your requirements
2. The only “Expert” is yourself - the buyer. Stay focused on your own requirements
3. Don’t be afraid to let the vendors educate you about their products or services
4. Closed questions (multiple choice) are better than open questions
5. Fewer good questions are better than many questions of variable quality

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EMR Match has partnered with SupplierSelect to launch a service for the evaluation and selection of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) vendors. EMR Match formed a committee of over 20 industry experts to build a set of requirements for evaluating EMR systems. These requirements are expressed as a SupplierSelect questionnaire with over 250 questions. Over 50 EMR vendors are now registered in the system, with pre-screening data available for a majority of those. This enables EMR buyers to manage a rigorous EMR RFP entirely through their browser using predefined criteria and issuing to pre-registered vendors.

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Auckland University of Technology (http://www.aut.ac.nz/) has successfully used SupplierSelect for evaluating and selecting a Student Information System for managing 25,000 students. 33 university staff collaborated through SupplierSelect on defining requirements and evaluating vendors’ bids.

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SupplierSelect now enables you to embed images within your RFP questions.

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Sometimes you want to restrict the type of information that can be input in response to your RFP questions. For example, you may wish to perform further analysis on answers input by respondents to your RFP:

• Price information, and you wish to compare prices between respondents
• Financial background information
• Technical details about the product or service being sourced

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“Reference Projects”, is a new feature added to SupplierSelect which enables vendors and buyers to build a set of reference information free from the restrictions of the standard tendering or RFx process.

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