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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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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SupplierSelect sends email notifications for significant events such as an invitation to respond being sent from a buyer to bidder. Previously, all email notifications sent by SupplierSelect came from a system email address (system@supplierselect.com). This occasionally causes problems, such as when the recipient is on holiday, and an automated out of office reply is sent.

SupplierSelect now supports per Project configuration of the “From” field to be used by email notifications. This a new mandatory field in “Project Details”. It can be changed at any time, even after a Project is published.

A prominent Procurement industry blog recently contacted SupplierSelect to see if we could contribute an article about public sector procurement transparency and how eSourcing software can help to make procurement processes more transparent. The article has just been published here:

http://procureinsights.wordpress.com

This article refers to the benefits of using eTendering and eRFX software generally, and is not specifically about using SupplierSelect. It draws on some of the lessons we’ve learnt from working with government organisations in the UK, Canada and especially New Zealand.