You can request that participants in your negotiation rovide high-level information beyond simply information provided for each negotiation line. This high-level information often solicits details about the supplier company itself. Note that participants could be both external, such as the suppliers themselves, or internal, such as approvers. Such high-level pieces of information are referred to as Requirements for the negotiation. Examples of Requirements might be
The number of years the supplier has been in business.
The supplier's business structure (public or private).
The supplier's business status (minority or woman owned).
Any appropriate certifications or licenses.
Using Requirements allows you to obtain important information on aspects of a supplier such as past performance, personnel qualification, and financial visibility. Knowing such information provides you with a better understanding of the supplier and allows you to make a more informed award decision.
Evaluating Requirements Responses When defining the Requirements for your negotiation, you can choose to have the system assign a score based on the participants' responses or choose to allow the response to be manually scored by members of an evaluation team (a Scoring Team). When using automatic system scoring, for each attribute you must also define the allowable values (or value ranges) and specify what score should be assigned to each.
See Scoring Responses to a Negotiation's Requirements for an explanation on entering score values and how a Requirement's score is calculated .
See Creating a Negotiation Header for instructions on creating header attributes .
See Using Team Scoring for details on setting up and using scoring teams.