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 stone the buyer's function.
For those who have the need, the task of the purchasing area is reduced to "picking up the phone" and requesting a quotation and deciding on the cheapest proposal, period.
In the sourcing area, they are aware of all the obstacles for a supplier to submit a good offer, such as having The bidding documents should be well defined, provide information that allows proposals under equal conditions, persuade the bidder to submit the bid on time, solve technical, commercial and financial doubts promptly, among others, but this text is not about that upstream problem, but the work that comes after and that is the consolidation of the offers received in a comparative table that allows to equalize, analyze, discuss and make the best decision about a purchase.
Main characteristics of the comparative tables
- Execute the entire quotation process focused on consolidating the comparative table.The process should be thought of as the beginning of the process where everything that is sent and requested is aligned with the completion of the final format for comparison and comparison. not the other way around, where the request is made in any form and the supplier is left to use its own formats and then must interpret each offer and do the titanic task of consolidating.
- Unify the format for all supply managers, This generates benefits by sharing information, streamlines presentations and decision making and avoids headaches in audits. Giving unique guidelines, even in the colors of the format, allows to generate confidence in what has been developed by the purchasing area.
- The format must be universal and must be built as a whole. The system must contain all the fields necessary to make a decision.
Here is 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:
- To be completed by supplier
This is the only format that begins with the completion by the buyer with the necessary information for each supplier to correctly fill out its economic offer.
- ID: Corresponds to the consecutive number of items to be quoted, either for goods or services.
- Subchapter: It is a classification of items that can be used for grouping. It is very important that, if variations of offers are required on the same item, 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: In case you have an ID coming from the ERP or similar.
- Description, Unit of Measurement and Quantity: Are the basic data that must be available from the applicant of the need. It is very important to express the unit of measure, 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, since there are needs that are not necessarily available in the domestic market and foreign suppliers are used, or due to price variations in the local currency, they are agreed in foreign currency. The recommendation is, as far as possible, to unify the currency of the offers by filling in this field and allow the bidder to make observations in the fields to be filled in.
- Information not visible to the supplier: Here you have standard fields such as the unit and total budgeted price, or the historical in case you do not have a budget defined. There are 3 additional optional fields of information not visible to the supplier that could be data such as the last supplier, last year's price, 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 include all the logistic conditions under which the good or service is expected to be received, delivery dates and times, packaging unit, loading and unloading, payment conditions, geographic locations, documentation requirements, references, etc.
Fields to fill in for the supplier:
- Unit and Total Price of the good or services
- Additional fields whose title must be filled in by the buyer and the content filled in 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 quotations in different currencies.
- Comparative table
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, the following fields are available:
- The lowest, highest and average prices offered by the bidders and the comparison of these values with the budgeted value: These fields allow you to have the full range of prices for an item and identify possible deviations among the proposals submitted. It is important to remember that the lowest price is not necessarily the best, since there may be considerations that do not represent the best price. lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).
