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

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

Read the rest of this entry »

SupplierSelect enables respondents to reuse answers to questions by copying them (importing) between different project. This is a particularly useful feature in consulting environments, where similar RFx questionnaires are re-issued to the same group of suppliers.

Previously, it was possible for respondents to import answers from previous projects into a full questionnaire, but not to import section by section.

New functionality released today allows answers to be imported section by section. The Screenshot below shows a Response with Section 1.1 selected:

Following the “Import Answers” link takes you to the standard Import page where you can select a previous project to import answers from.

New charting functionality has been added to SupplierSelect. This shows a horizontal bar chart which displays weighted scores by respondent for any point within the questionnaire: Section, Sub-Section or Question. If multiple scoring or weighting sets have been configured, these can be picked in the top drop down lists.

These charts can be viewed by selected the “Analysis” tab from the questionnaire browsing pages (reached by selected the questionnaire tree on the right after loading a project).

Dynamic Questions use a predefined set of “Topics” to generate large questions by repeating question rows for each Topic. To illustrate this feature, suppose your company ships its goods to many countries around the world. You wish to conduct an RFx to evaluate shipping companies. When building the question, you notice that you often need to collect information for each country you ship to:

Read the rest of this entry »

Assigning weightings to a complex questionnaire is always a fiddly business. Until now, SupplierSelect provided either very detailed control (over questions), or very high level control (using the graphical percentage tool). With the latest release of SupplierSelect it is possible to edit weightings at any level of the questionnaire.

Read the rest of this entry »

Re-using the same questionnaires can bring great efficiencies with SupplierSelect. Respondents can import and edit a previous set of responses, and scores are silently copied at the same time. This means that scoring a response become an exercise in exception processing - you only read/score what has changed. But scoring like this can lead to inconsistencies because the comparison is against the project of respondent’s choosing (ie the response they imported from). SupplierSelect addresses this problem with a new feature: Benchmark Issues.

Read the rest of this entry »

Many evaluators find it convenient to read respondent’s answers offline, on paper, noting the scores as they go. Then they need to get the scores back into SupplierSelect. Web pages are not very convenient for data entry of this sort, so we’ve introduced the ability to key in scores to an Excel spreadsheet which can then be uploaded to SupplierSelect, and the scores saved.

This functionality is found under the “Score Offline” link under “Project” in the tree menu on the left hand side of the page after you load a Project. The first step is to download the current scores in Excel format. This delivers a spreadsheet with one question per row, with a column for each respondent. You can now edit the scores directly in this spreadsheet. When finished, save the edited spreadsheet on your PC. Then return to the same “Score Offline” page in SupplierSelect, and click the “Browse” button to locate the spreadsheet and then the “Upload” button to import these edited scores back into SupplierSelect.

If you download a spreadsheet which already has some scores populated, and then just edit a few of these before re-uploading, SupplierSelect will only overwrite the scores that have changed.

A new look home page for Evaluator users is going to be released on SupplierSelect in the next couple of weeks:

Previously, the default page after logging in was the big list of projects. However, we’re weren’t happy with that for a number of reasons:

1. Most evaluators work on only one or two projects at the same time - they don’t need a huge list of projects every time they login.
2. Projects go through stages. After all responses are in, users don’t want to edit the title or change question text. So we wanted to provide links to go directly to the scoring page, if that had been visited.
3. We don’t have a good way to communicate news about releases, features or service updates to users. We’d like to get that information into a convenient location.
4. New users can be intimidated by an empty list of projects. We wanted to add some big friendly links which would be genuinely useful to first time users.

N.B.

“Portal” pages, of which this new home page is probably a type, are difficult to get right. Very often users will just hurry through the portal page to the page that they are more used to. We hope this doesn’t happen with our new evaluator home page, but if it does, please let us know.

A big RFx will often require multiple people to complete the response. This can be a complex task to schedule and administer.

SupplierSelect provides a workflow system to aid team work in this situation.

Read the rest of this entry »

Weightings are used to place a different importance on different questions or sections in a questionnaire. But what happens when there is more than one perspective on what these features are? For example, the Chief Financial Officer might have a different view on the importance of the Pricing section to the Chief Operations Officer, who’s more interested in the Performance section.

Read the rest of this entry »