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 reports helps to drill down to the questions that most differentiate vendors responses.

(more…)

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

(more…)

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

(more…)

“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.

(more…)

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.

The purpose of asking questions in an RFP is to elicit information from suppliers that allows an objective assessment and comparison of bids. To achieve this, questions must be framed in such a way as to minimise ambiguity. In general, this means asking more “closed” questions - that is questions with a limited range of possible answers, such as multiple choice or numerical questions. However, in practice, this can be difficult. In this article we explore how to frame a good RFP question.

(more…)

This describes some of the ways in which web based software can help public sector organisations comply with common regulations. This article draws upon our experience of working with public sector organisations in Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom to provide some ideas for how to use eSourcing and eRFX software in public sector tenders.

(more…)

Running an RFP / RFx project through SupplierSelect involves evaluating vendors or suppliers through the use of surveys or questionnaires. Building a questionnaire for the first time - designing the questions, creating sections and subsections is perhaps the most time consuming aspect of using SupplierSelect. This article describes some of the features designed to make this process a little easier.

(more…)

Some questions and sections in an RFx survey or questionnaire are more important than others. This relative importance should be reflected when total scores are calculated for the vendors being assessed. SupplierSelect allows evaluators to set weights for both questions and sections, and can then calculate weighted totals using one of two possible scoring formulas.

(more…)