When companies criticize the work of the purchasing area and minimize its importance, there is nothing worse than sending or presenting a bad comparative table to the requesting area or the decision committee to undermine the buyer’s role. 

For those who have the need, the task of the purchasing area is reduced to “picking up the phone” and requesting a quote and deciding on the cheapest proposal, period. 

In the supply area, they are aware of all the obstacles that a supplier has to send a good offer, such as having well-defined specifications, providing information that allows proposals on equal terms, persuading it to be sent on time, solving problems. technical, commercial, financial doubts quickly, among others, but this text is not about that upstream problem, but rather the work that comes after and is the consolidation of the offers received in a comparative table that allows equalization, analysis, discussion and make the best decision about a purchase. 

Main characteristics of the comparative tables 

1. Execute the entire quote process focused on consolidating the comparative table , you should think of this as a beginning of the process where everything that is sent and requested is aligned with the completion of the final format to compare and not the other way around, where it is requested in any case and the supplier is left to use their own formats and then each offer must be interpreted and the titanic work of consolidating is done.
    

2. Unify the format for all supply managers, this generates benefits by sharing information, speeds up presentations and decision making and avoids audit headaches. Giving unique guidelines down to the colors of the format allows you to generate confidence in what is developed by the purchasing area. 

3. The format must be universal and must be built together by both purchases and requesting users and must contain all the fields necessary to make a decision. 

We leave you a template that you can use for your comparative tables. Download it here. 

How to use the comparison chart template? 

The template has two sheets: 

1. To fill out supplier 

It is the only format that begins with the buyer filling out the necessary information for each of the suppliers to correctly complete their economic offer. 

• ID: Corresponds to the consecutive number of items to be quoted, whether goods or services. 
• Subchapter: It is a classification of items that can be used to group. It is very important that, if variations in offers on the same item are required, such as the provision of a good from different geographical locations, this is distributed as rows, different items with their respective description and this will facilitate the understanding of all interlocutors. 
• Code: If you have an identification that comes from the ERP or similar. 
• Description, Unit of Measurement and Quantity: These are the basic data that the applicant for the need must have. It is very important to express the unit of measurement, in market terms that are clear enough for all bidders. 
• Currency: This parameter is one of the most complex to deal with in the comparative tables, as it has needs that are not necessarily achieved in the national market and foreign suppliers are used, or due to price variations in the local currency, they are agreed in foreign currency. The recommendation is, to the extent possible, to unify the currency of the offers by filling out this field and allowing the offeror to make observations in the fields to be filled out. 
• Information not visible to the supplier: Here there are standard fields such as the budgeted unit and total price, or the history if a budget is not defined. 3 additional optional fields of information not visible to the supplier are considered, which could be data such as the last supplier, the price of the last year, etc. 
• Information fields visible to the supplier: 10 optional fields of information visible to the supplier are considered. At this point it is important to put all the logistical conditions under which the good or service is expected to be received, delivery dates and times, packaging unit, load and download, payment conditions, geographical locations, documentation requirements, references, etc. 

Fields to fill out the supplier: 

• Unit and Total Price of the good or services 
• Additional fields whose title must be filled out by the buyer and the content filled out by each supplier. In this section it is important to require important information such as brand, incoterm in case of import, currency in case of allowing quotes in different currencies. 

2. Comparative table 

It corresponds to the consolidation of the economic offers of the different suppliers. In addition to the consolidation of offers from all bidders and the information provided by the buyer, there are the following fields: 

• Lower, higher and average of the prices offered by the bidders and the comparison of these values ​​with the budgeted value: These fields allow you to have the entire spectrum of prices for an item and identify possible deviations between the proposals presented. It is important to remember that the lowest price is not necessarily the best, since there may be considerations that do not represent the lower TCO (Total Owner Cost).