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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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