Glossary · Management
Tender evaluation criteria
The weighted criteria against which bids are scored, fixed and published before bids are opened so that the evaluation cannot be shaped to a preferred bidder.
- Field
- Management
- Examined in
- CBA-CPM
- Learning objectives
- 3
Where the CBA Standards examine it
Procurement & Supply ManagerCBA-CPM
- 2.3Construct weighted evaluation criteria and calculate weighted scores to rank supplier bids.Tendering and Supplier Selection
- 2.6Identify practices that compromise fairness in a tender, such as unequal information, bid manipulation and post-tender changes to criteria.Tendering and Supplier Selection
- 6.3Evaluate sustainability criteria (environmental, social and governance) for inclusion in specifications and tender evaluation.Procurement Ethics, Sustainability and Risk
In the specimen paper
A Kenyan mobile network published a weighting of 60 price and 40 quality, and scored price by giving the lowest bid 100 marks, the highest bid zero and interpolating between them. The four bids fell between GBP 4.1m and GBP 4.3m, and quality scores ran from 62 to 68. A losing bidder says the tender was decided almost entirely on price. What does the arithmetic show?
Answer
Price accounted for about 96 per cent of the marks actually in play
Why that is the answer
A published weighting sets the marks that are available; what decides an award is the marks that actually move between bidders. Range scoring spends the entire 100-mark price scale on whatever spread the bids happen to show, so a gap of GBP 200,000 becomes the full 60 weighted marks, while a quality spread of 6 points yields only 6 multiplied by 0.4, or 2.4 weighted marks. Sixty against 2.4 is about 96 per cent, so the losing bidder is right on the arithmetic even though the buyer applied the weighting it published. Model your formula against plausible bids before the invitation goes out, because the formula and the scale, not the weights, set the real balance.
Related terms
- Invitation to tender (ITT)Management
A formal request to suppliers to submit a bid against a defined specification, terms and evaluation criteria.
- Total cost of ownership (TCO)Management
The full cost of acquiring, operating, maintaining and disposing of an asset or service over its life, not only its purchase price.