Bid Evaluation: Overcoming Common Pain Points
One of the most challenging aspects of managing a major purchasing project is efficiently organizing and evaluating vendor bid responses.
One of the most effective ways to overcome this challenge is to use a bid evaluation module as part of an electronic procurement solution. Bid evaluation allows buyers to create custom evaluation forms and to easily compare multiple bids to determine the winning vendor quickly.
Having the ability to rapidly organize and evaluate vendor bids is just one benefit of bid evaluation, however. With bid evaluation, buying organizations can benefit from a quicker bid-to-contract cycle, reducing costly delays and improving overall efficiency. A comprehensive bid evaluation solution also helps to improve accountability in sourcing by ensuring that buying organizations make clear, data-supported decisions when choosing vendors for a project.
Below are a few of the major pain points buying organizations must deal with during the bid evaluation process.
High number of proposals to be evaluated
When many proposals land on your desk, you need a way to quickly triage, score and evaluate the responses and come up with a list of finalists. Only once the inadequate proposals have been weeded out can a more in-depth evaluation process of potential winners be undertaken. A suite of e-procurement tools including a bid evaluation module helps you do exactly that by organizing all proposals (including non-electronic responses) in a single location, making them easy to review and evaluate.
Complicated proposal scoring structure
Knowing how to accurately score a vendor proposal means differentiating between what must be scored and what is superfluous to the process. With a bid evaluation module, buying organizations can create custom evaluation forms that focus only on elements that are critical to the project at hand, making it that much easier to compare, evaluate and score vendor proposals.
Possible vendor/buyer conflicts of interest
Potential conflicts of interest between a vendor and buyer represent a challenge that can easily slip under the radar of buying organizations if they are not careful. A bid evaluation module makes it simple to compare and review vendor responses in a way that provides valuable clarity on any conflicts of interest, and gives buying organizations a chance to make sure there will be no surprises as a project moves forward.
Identifying high-scoring vendors
When scoring and evaluating dozens of proposals, it can be easy to miss an important detail or overlook an error. The challenge of catching every nuance of a proposal to ensure that a vendor is scored correctly can be exacerbated if the proposal is particularly complex or lengthy. A bid evaluation module helps buying organizations to instantly identify the highest ranked bidder according to the criteria set out in the scorecard and helps make sure that no critical information is overlooked.
Bid Evaluation: A Clear Win for Buying Organizations
The ease of use of electronic procurement solutions makes it a breeze to implement bid evaluation and to quickly begin benefiting from time savings and efficiency improvements. Bid evaluation functionality can easily be integrated with other modules (such as Contract Management and Bid Distribution) to create a seamless bid management experience for purchasing departments.
Find out how BidNet Direct can help your government organization today! 
