- Evaluating vendor responses to RFP proposals requires an objective, quantitative approach.
- Maintaining an equal, level, and unbiased evaluation process is essential to ensuring accurate vendor response evaluation and negotiation leverage.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Many evaluation teams do not allocate sufficient governance and time to effectively evaluate vendor RFP responses.
- Vendor RFP responses are challenging and frustrating to evaluate due to their inconsistency in format, worksheets, and outline.
- Investing the energy, time, and resources during the creation of your RFP will reduce the amount of time required to review vendors’ responses during the evaluation process. Having precise and meaningful requirements for the vendors to provide a simplistic response is best.
Impact and Result
- Create and format your RFP to control the vendors’ responses to enable effective and timely evaluation of the offer.
- Deploy a quantitative evaluation process that removes as much bias as possible.
- Ensure the evaluation team can reserve sufficient time on their calendars to prevent a rushed review of the vendors' responses.