Help Home/Getting Started with Oracle Sourcing

In a price-only negotiation, suppliers can quote/bid on price, quantity, delivery dates and attributes of an item, however, the system ranks the supplier only on the basis of price. In a Multi-Attribute Weighted Scoring negotiation, item attributes can be scored and weighted. The winning response is decided based on the buyer's definitions of the relative importance of item attributes, reflected in the Price-to-Total-Score.

In both price-only and Multi-Attribute Weighted Scoring negotiation, the buyer can still award the negotiation to any supplier regardless of the Price to Total Score ratio values.

Multi-Attribute Weighted Scoring is the ability for a buyer to use customizable attributes to define a product or service in a quantifiable manner. This allows the buyer to define the relative importance of each attribute by assigning weights to these attributes and scores to expected values for each attribute.

Each weight assigned to an item attribute is a number between one and 100 that represents the importance of that attribute compared to other item attributes. The higher the weight, the more important the attribute to the item.

Scores are numbers between zero and 100 and are assigned to each possible attribute value or range of values. The higher the score, the more desirable the attribute value or range of values. Scores represent the desirability of that attribute value or range of values compared to other values. The goal of scoring is to motivate a respondent to respond with quotes/bids most closely matching the desired attribute values.

Weights and scores can be assigned to the custom attributes, quantity, or need-by date. Custom attributes having weights and scores are called weighted attributes and require a response. As responses are received, the system calculates a weighted score for each attribute response and a Total Score for the item. It then ranks the scores for the same item from different respondents based on a Price to Total Score ratio.