CHAPTER 7: REVIEW RESPONSES AND PRODUCE SHORTLIST

Once you’ve received all the responses, you and the team need to spend time reviewing them. Then you can agree (hopefully) a shortlist of around three options.

This chapter covers:

• how to review the responses
• example summary of responses document template
• how to shortlist
• what to do if a decision cannot be reached
• advising the rejected suppliers.

How to review the responses

You won’t be surprised to hear that you need to read the responses and fill in your criteria sheets, including scoring if you decided to do that.

This sounds easy and straightforward! And with a few responses it will be. Some suppliers will be very good at answering your RFI clearly, with details in the order in which you asked them, and with all information provided as requested.

Others, however, will have used their own standard response documentation, just changing a few bits to deal with the specifics. This means that all the information you receive may be there, but you’ll need to hunt around for it. As some responses can be huge, with multiple attachments, this can take some doing!

A few may also be very scanty indeed. Surprisingly, this is often the case with your existing supplier, who sometimes seems to feel that they don’t need to say very much, perhaps because they think you already know all about their system/service.

At this stage, you may simply want to note if a piece of information is missing (or, at least, can’t be found). If the supplier goes through to the next stage, you can check up on it then. However, if it’s something really significant, it may be worth going back to them to ask for it. It can be a dilemma – do you mark them down because they missed it out, but risk losing a good option, or do you chase them? If the rest of the response looks good, it’s probably worth chasing.

Example summary of responses document template

If you decided to have one key person summarising all the responses for the team, this section includes a basic format for a typical Summary of Responses document. It can also be used to document the collated team reviews for posterity or perhaps for an approval board. Depending on what you want to use this document for, you may want to add more information.

Text in normal print can be included ‘as is’ (or tailored of course). Text in italics is guidance text and should be replaced with your content.

Example: Summary of responses

1 Introduction

Enter a brief account of the background to the selection.

Provide an overview of steps taken so far, e.g.

A Request for Information was issued to obtain initial solution information, to enable the team to scope the cost and timescales of implementing a replacement (or upgraded) product more accurately, and to check the likely level of fit to requirements.

This report documents this activity.

2 Objectives of the selection

Briefly summarise the main objectives, likely to be similar to:

There are two main objectives:

3 Process use

Outline the steps in this stage of the process, i.e. up to shortlisting. As below or amend as necessary:

A Request for Information (RFI) was produced, containing the following sections:

[Number] products were initially identified for consideration:

The RFI was issued on [date], with responses to be returned by end [date].

4 Overview of responses

[Number] suppliers provided a response:

A summary of these is detailed in Appendix A.

The following suppliers declined to respond:

Put their details and some explanation if there is one.

5 Recommendation

The recommended shortlist comprises:

The main reasons for rejecting the others were:

Put their details and some justification for why they were rejected.

6 Appendix A: Summary of responses

It’s useful to have a statement showing the current level of investigation, such as:

This summary is based on the information provided in the responses. All facts are assumed to be true; they have not been verified at this stage.

Then you can add a table similar to the criteria ones shown in Chapter 6, but with the detail showing the summary or being a collation of all the reviewers’ comments.

How to shortlist

The easiest way is to hold a meeting with all the reviewers. Before the meeting remind everyone that they need to have done all their reviews and should come armed with their notes and scores. There are a number of ways to run this meeting; one useful procedure is as follows:

• See if you can easily eliminate any responses. Are any missing mandatory requirements? Or were any a very poor response overall?
• Go through each of the remaining responses and get feedback from each team member. If you’ve done scores, these can be written up on a flipchart.
• See if you have any obvious candidates for the shortlist. Are there any that everyone agrees is excellent?
• If this doesn’t give you a shortlist, then you may need to vote on the remainder.

How long should your shortlist be? Three is the normal number to aim for. Not only is this good due diligence, but it’s a manageable number on which to do an in-depth investigation.

If you can only get two, that can be acceptable, but you should fully document why none of the others are viable. If you can’t get below four, then that’s okay, it just means that you’ll have to put more time into the in-depth investigation activities. If you’re stuck with five (or more!), read the next section, otherwise you can skip to the subsequent section (Advising the rejected suppliers).

What if a decision cannot be reached?

It can sometimes be difficult to reduce to three or four options for your shortlist. Perhaps there are one or two really good ones and then several that appear fairly similar. Or there may be a lot of good choices and you don’t feel you have enough information to reject them at this stage.

Although not ideal, this situation doesn’t cause too much of a problem. You need to discuss with the team what will be necessary in order to reduce down to a sensible shortlist. One possible solution is to have each of the suppliers come in for a short pitch meeting, say around 90 minutes long. Their brief will be to take you through their response and to answer questions. If it’s a system then they could do a short, say 20 minutes, demonstration of some key features.

You can make the meetings more structured by providing the suppliers with some supplementary questions that you want answered or, if there’s to be a demonstration, you could specify what you want to see (it can be helpful to see a common business process from start to end, rather than have them hop around individual features).

Another option is to ask to have a reference that you could have a short phone chat with. This can be particularly useful if ongoing support is a key factor.

Whatever you decide to do, try to keep the activities to a minimum. You are effectively starting the in-depth investigation in order to finish shortlisting, but this can become very time-consuming if you’re trying to do this with five or six (or more!) suppliers.

Once the activities have been completed, hold another shortlisting meeting and, hopefully, you’ll now be able to get down to three. If not, then repeat this section!

Advising the rejected suppliers

This is never a pleasant task, but it does need to be done as soon as possible after the shortlist has been agreed. A short e-mail will usually suffice. If at all possible, provide brief feedback as to why the supplier was rejected. Try to keep it constructive! After all, even the worst response has had some time spent on it, and the supplier deserves to know how to improve next time.

Some suppliers may then contact you again by e-mail or even by phone. If you are able to give them any additional information then you can do so, otherwise tell them politely that you’ve already provided them with all possible details. Occasionally one will keep on contacting you and you may need to be more firm, but the vast majority will be content with receiving useful feedback.