Decide Which Vendors Match Best – After the walk through of the vendors, we rate and rank them based on the criteria you have developed in previous steps. ITX can help a great deal in this regard. We have historical project tracking information and industry intelligence that may give you better insight into your rankings.
Get Help if You Need It – Of course, you are free to rank vendors based on your own findings. But if you want to for example: Do a DI with some vendor that has never done one before, we may say, “let’s look at this vendor’s history. They’ve been around for five years and not one client does this product” – just to make you aware of the added risk. We like all the vendors. We’re neither friend nor foe but ITX does have many facts we can share with you.
And Finalize a Short List – Your team will get down to a short list of vendors they’ve assessed. This is important because we do not want to waste vendor’s time, having them spend $20,000 to $50,000 on each RFI when they don’t even qualify. We just want the vendors that are viable to be the ones we talk to.
That is the Best Method – Some carriers have a “bidding meeting” where all the vendors will attend. The carrier’s team will ask the vendors general questions. Of course, no vendor wants to answer the question because their competitors are right there. That’s really an awkward meeting to have. If you do a vendor rating and ranking instead, that matches up with your systems solution profile, it’s faster, more cost effective, and delivers a much better result.