SupplierSelect is very excited to have begun working with leading tender consultants, Tony Zemaitis Associates. In addition to help with traditional tenders, they will be offering training and hands-on support for sales teams in e-tendering and electronic RFP management, using SupplierSelect as their training environment. Tony Zemaitis are particularly experienced in working with public sector tenders in the European Union.

SupplierSelect provides a number of features to help Suppliers manage their RFP responses online, and we are delighted that our supplier users will now be able to benefit from training provided by Tony Zemaitis Associates.

http://www.zemaitis-uk.com/

Answering a long RFP is a time consuming business. To make life easier for suppliers or vendors responding to RFx questionnaires, SupplierSelect is introducing a new feature which automatically saves answers as they are input, without having to submit a form and wait for the page to reload. This allows users to view a full page of all questions in a section, inputting answers, and having the new information saved each time they move between fields.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

To help our customers get quickly up to speed with SupplierSelect we’re going to be producing a number of training videos using Screen Recording software. We’re still learning how to produce these effectively, but here’s a preview of our first (not very impressive!) efforts.

Score a single respondent’s answer to an RFx question.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Read the rest of this entry »

Scoring data from RFP / RFx projects is used in different ways by different organisations. It can be statistically manipulated, analyzed 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 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:

Read the rest of this entry »

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).