Dwaffler for vendor selection

Reach rapid consensus in vendor selection

Looking for a product or services vendor?
Overwhelmed by factors to consider?

Are you looking for a business to provide:

Contract manufacturing
Computer systems
Construction
Third-party logistics
Government contracting

Machinery or equipment
IT development
Parts
Training or management consulting

If you simply need to find the cheapest bidder, then vendor selection is fairly easy.

In all other cases, finding the right vendor is a huge challenge. If you are considering a high-profile purchase, you’ve got more factors to consider than just price. You want the magical combination of quality, service and price. But finding that balance - that’s the trick behind the magic.

A challenging wish list

Once you receive the proposals, perhaps you tried to put together a decision matrix. The key question is how do you determine scores for each vendor? Some factors are easy to measure and quantify:

Cost
Features
Company size
Years in business

But even there, how do you translate features into a score? Is a product with more features better, or is another product better because its fewer features work better? Next, we consider important factors that are hard to measure or quantify:

Relevant experience: has this vendor done a project like this? Can they meet the needs of a client like us?
Quality: do their products meet or exceed our quality requirements? Do they implement quality control processes to ensure consistent product quality?
Service: Are they responsive to our requests? Do we feel comfortable working with their representatives?
Ability to fulfill contract: Do they have a reputation for fulfilling client contracts?

So the first challenge is to determine scores for objective and subjective factors.

But even if you could determine scores, you have a second challenge: prioritizing the scoring factors. What’s more important - price, features or quality? Are you willing to pay extra to get more features? How much more? What about the tradeoff between price and service - how much are you willing to pay to get better or faster service?

Considering these tradeoffs, it may be tough to reach consensus. Your vendor selection committee may have different views of what is good or acceptable. There may be different opinions on what’s more important. So the third challenge is to reach rapid consensus on the selection factors.

But even with consensus, how do you show that the decision is fair and just? Perhaps you have to justify the decision to the shareholders - or the taxpayers. Or at least show management that you made the right choice. So the fourth challenge is to have a decision-making process that is open and accountable.

Let's review the challenging wish list for selecting a vendor:

Considering both subjective and objective factors
Prioritizing the various scoring factors
Reaching rapid consensus on the vendor
Having a process that is open and accountable

Why Dwaffler?

Dwaffler can help you quickly prioritize and reach rapid consensus.

There are two key steps to using Dwaffler for vendor selection:

Prioritize the desired criteria that you want for your ideal vendor.
Rate the possible vendors against the criteria.

About the criteria

The criteria help you judge how well the possible vendors meet your requirements. You determine the list of criteria that suit your needs - price, time-to-deliver, features, experience, quality, etc.

The next step is to determine the importance for each of the criteria. Now, if you try using a simple spreadsheet, you might put scores by each of the criteria: you might say that "low price" gets a score of 8, while "can deliver immediately" gets a score of 7. But if you start to assign scores as a group, chances are that you'll spend the rest of your meeting arguing over whether "low price" deserves a score of 8, 9 or 8.45.

And here's what makes Dwaffler different: you don't assign arbitrary scores to the criteria. Instead, you simply compare pairs of criteria. For instance, you might determine that "low price" is somewhat more important than "can deliver immediately". Dwaffler gives you three simple options: more significant, much more significant, and about the same.

Dwaffler uses these comparisons to determine the overall scores. In addition, Logic Wizard™ can find inconsistent comparisons and suggest several ways to fix major inconsistencies.

To rate the criteria, the vendor selection committee can work as a group or as individuals. If your committee works together, you organize a meeting where the group compares each pair of criteria. A trained Dwaffler facilitator can resolve any disagreements through a combination of psychological and analytical techniques. Alternately, each person can prepare a personal set of comparisons; the Dwaffler software can consolidate these into a team score and highlight any areas with strong disagreement.

Evaluating vendors

Here's the main goal of vendor selection: to identify the vendors that best support the overall needs. Using Dwaffler's "numberless" approach, you simply evaluate whether a vendor rates "high", "medium" or "low" in terms of each of the criteria. Since you want to distinguish between vendors, you don't waste time splitting hairs over whether a vendor rates a 6 or a 7 in terms of some criterion like "can deliver quickly". This would be close enough that both vendors should have the same rating.

Again, to evaluate vendors, your committee can work as a group or as individuals. If your committee works together, the group evaluates each proposed vendor in terms of each of the criteria. This can be part of the meeting to rate the criteria, or it can be a separate meeting. Alternately, each person can evaluate the proposed vendors; the Dwaffler software can consolidate these into a group score and highlight any areas with strong disagreement.

Once the evaluation is complete, Dwaffler links the vendors and criteria and rates how well each vendor supports the requirements. You can view a graph for all the vendors, or compare two vendors to understand why one gets a higher rating.

The extras

Need to consider risk? Dwaffler can consider risk separately from requirements, so that you can properly evaluate the risk that a vendor may not may not meet delivery dates, the risk that a vendor may not deliver the desired features or quality, etc.
Need to select multiple vendors? Dwaffler can evaluate vendors individually or as a group, in case you need to consider synergies that occur when you select a team of vendors.
Need to evaluate someone's favorite vendor? Dwaffler can show how it compares to the rest, helping you to explain when it doesn't fit the overall requirements.

The catch?

Is Dwaffler a time-consuming process? Absolutely not. Dwaffler customers say that the entire evaluation and review can be done in a matter of hours.
Is Dwaffler too complex? No way. Most Dwaffler customers aren't engineers who enjoy pushing buttons on the computer. Dwaffler is designed to be visual, not mathematical. (Even still, the engineers like Dwaffler, too!)
Is Dwaffler affordable? Definitely. Dozens of startup and nonprofit organizations have made Dwaffler an integral part of their budgeting process. (Can you really afford to select a vendor without the analytic power of Dwaffler?)

See some demos of Dwaffler