- Your Role during RFx Evaluation
- Why are Evaluation comments important?
- What is a strong or weak Evaluation comment?
Your Role during RFx Evaluation
As an Evaluator, you are responsible for three main tasks.
- Understanding the Evaluation Guide provided by the Procurement Officer, including the Submission Instructions provided in your RFx documents.
- Independently reviewing and scoring each Proposal in Bonfire by:
- Entering score(s) based only on the criteria outlined in the RFx submission instructions,
- Selecting the primary reason for your score(s), and
- Providing detailed comments, including recording any questions or concerns regarding a Proposal.
- Attending Consensus Meeting(s), if required.
Why are Evaluation comments important?
It’s important for all Evaluators to provide strong comments during the Evaluation stage of your RFx. Investing time to write thorough comments has several benefits, including:
- Satisfying all relevant Procurement regulation requirements (for example, the Broader Public Sector Procurement Directive)
- Ensuring the University is following best practices by maintaining detailed records of all Procurement decisions, and
- Supporting Procurement Services’ ability to provide quality feedback to Vendors in the event of a debriefing request. This allows the University to build relationships with our Vendor community, improves the likelihood that the Vendor will be willing to submit proposals for future opportunities, and assists them in submitting stronger proposals in the future.
Important: In some cases, Procurement Services may ask you to strengthen your Evaluation comments before moving to the next stage in your procurement.
What is a strong or weak Evaluation comment?
Strong Evaluation Comments
A strong evaluation comment:
- Identifies both strengths and weaknesses of the proposal,
- Is objective and fact-based, as much as possible,
- Is detailed and specific enough to clearly support the score provided, and
- Only contains considerations that were part of the Submission Instructions (see your Evaluation Guide).
Example 1, High score:
In general, the company meets our expectations by:
- completed 50+ projects in the commercial, industrial, institutional, and residential sectors, including jobs for large-size companies ($10M+ revenue, 200+ employees)
- took part in more than 10 very large-scale projects ($10 – 100M)
- able to respond onsite in 4 hours and 2 hours in case of emergencies
- provided responses to all evaluation criteria requirements
However, there are some drawbacks that do not allow the company to receive the highest available score:
- the company does not have the capability to have spare parts available on-site within the 24-hour window requested and has to rely on CU storage provided
- some bigger equipment may need to be rented depending on the size of the project
As a result, the company meets most of our expectations in this evaluation category and received a high score despite not meeting some of our non-critical requirements.
Example 2, Low score:
The vendor does not meet our requirements in many areas:
- no experience implementing any large-scale software projects ($5M+)
- was not able to provide a demo as requested
- poor submission quality, some answers were not provided at all, like their customer support structure
But there are some advantages:
- the key personnel have all credentials required by the RFx
In conclusion, this vendor gets a low score as the proposal did not cover most of our requirements.
Weak Evaluation Comments
An unacceptable evaluation comment:
- Is not balanced, focusing on strengths or weaknesses only
- Is subjective – the comment is based on assumptions, theories or information not provided in the proposal
- Does not provide sufficient information to support the score provided – too short and non-descriptive
- Considers criteria that were not part of the Submission Instructions (a.k.a. ‘hidden criteria’), including those that are not allowable by applicable legislation
Example 1:
Does not meet our requirements – I have never heard of them before.
Example 2:
Poor response.
Example 3:
Not local to Ottawa, and I would not want to deal with a firm from CITY X and the different time zones during implementation.