It's nice to hear some vendors chew on all this stuff you sent them, isn't it? Well, if they want to have a change of doing business with you, they have to sweat, they have to earn it… feels great!

But as the answers are coming in, the ball is getting back into your court. You have to work again. You and your team have to read the brochures and the answers to the questionnaire and make a judgement against the criteria you defined.

The evaluation has to parts, the soft and the hard one. The soft is making a subjective evaluation of what you actually think of the vendors and it's product. It's in fact the answer to if the vendor meets the selection criteria. The other one is just plain calculus: an estimate on the price of the software licenses (just using the list prices!).

8.1 Judging the selection criteria 

Let everybody involved in the evaluation sit down, and summarize the strong and weak points of the vendors / software. Throw them all together in a document.

Strong points

• Local support
• Used technology is standard in current market
• Great opportunity to link to other systems
• Large international firm

Weak points

• No core business in our market
• Second site to use the system live
• Limited knowledge of the local market

Map the results against your list of selection criteria, and presto, you have your ranking. I know, it's not rocket science, but let's face it, it isn't. It's all subjective and your gut feeling. If you want to go more scientific about it, you can always plot a great graph.

Stability of vendor  

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2007 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Software Selection.