ITC4780 Unit VI Mini Project

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Chapter 12

conferences help ensure that everyone has a clear, common understanding of the buyer's desired products or services. In some cases , the bidders' conference might be he ld online via a Webcast or using other communications technology. Buyers will also post procurement information on a Web site and post answers to fr equently asked questions. Before, during, or after the bidders' conference, the buyer m ay incorporate responses to questions into the procurement documents as amendments .

O nce buyers receive proposals or bids , they can select a supplier or dec id e to cancel the procurement. Selecting suppliers or sellers, often called source selection, involves evaluat- ing proposals or bids from sellers, choosing the bes t one, negotiating the contract, a nd awarding the contract. It can be a long, tedious process , especially for la rge procurements. Several stake holders in the procure m e nt process s hould be involved in selecting the best s upplier for the project. Often teams of people are responsible fo r evaluating various sec- tions of the proposals. There might be a technical team , a management team, a nd a cost team to focus on each of those m ajor areas. Buyers typically deve lop a short list of the top three to five suppli e rs to reduce the work involved in selecting a source.

Experts in sourc e selection highl y recommend that buye rs use formal proposal evalua - ti o n s hee ts during source selection. Figure 12-5 provides a sample proposa l evaluation sheet that the project tea m might use to h elp create a short list of th e best three to fi ve proposals. No tice that this example is a form of a weighted scoring model as described in Chapter 4, Project Integra tion Management. The score for a criterion would be c alcula ted by multiply- ing the weight of that criterion by the rating for tha t proposa l. Adding up the scores would provide the total weighted score for each proposa l. The proposals with the highest weighted scores s hould be included in the short list of possible sellers. Experts also reco mmend that technical criteria should not be given m ore weight than m a nage ment or cost criteria. Many organizations h a ve suffered the consequences of paying too muc h attention to the technical aspects of proposals. For exa mple, the proj ec t might cos t much more than ex pected or take longer to complete because th e source se lection team focused only on technical aspects of proposals . Paying too much attention to technical as pects of proposals is especially likely to occur on information technology projects. However, it is oft en the supplier's management tea m-no t the technical team-that makes procure men t successful.

Proposal 1 Proposal 2 Proposal 3, etc.

Criteria Weight Rating Score Rating Score Rating Score

Technica l 30% approach

Management 30% approach

Past 20% performance

Price 20%

Tota l score 100%

FIGURE 12-5 Sample proposal evaluation sheet