How to make objective suppliers evaluation according to your company values

As a pricing analyst and accounting analyst I had to evaluate suppliers and partners. Sometimes evaluate than can become a very personal activity and that impacts the professionalism and objectiveness of your decisions over purchasing and engaging projects with some partners.

Let’s bring the discution to a daily situation, you like a restaurant because the service is good, because the food is good because the decoration gives you a good feeling. You like a specific car and choose it because of the driving feeling, because it’s fast, confortable, economic, cheap.

All of those adjectives bring you to a subjective evaluation and subjective decision. In management, on a company, maybe it’s more coherent to use objective decisions and support those on objective parameters. So the great question is how to put subjective feelings into objective parameters.

Let’s get back into the restaurant. You like the good service. Ok that is very subjective, let’s work a little on your values, each company has own values and culture and that makes it quite as subjective as a person. So many times what’s the best joice for a company won’t fit into other company.

So what is the best service for your company? What value do you apply to the  ability to answer quickly, to assertive answers and solutions? Creativeness? How elastic is your position against the service price? 
ok now we found the values. Let’s put those into a fair objective parameter.

We shall create matrix of your values and rank the cost/benefit of each supplier as below:

1. Time that the supplier answer your quotes and inquiries
2. Number of problems created against time to solve those
3. How many /effective their solutions are
4. What price they have.

Going back to the car, you like it because it’s fast? We can measure how fast a car is by measuring it acceleration. Do you like it because it is comfortable?  We can measure the space for your legs and head and also the space for each passenger.  You like because it’s economic? You can check it consumes per kilometer. Do you like because it is cheap? You can measure maintenance and other costs during your quotation.

Almost every aspect of a service or a product can be put from a subjective value into an objective parameter. And with an objective decision it’ll get easier to understand why you’re taking the best decision.