In many organizations, one or more teams of people evaluate large and/or complex negotiations. These teams are mad up of individuals who may or may not be familiar with the specific negotiation (and are therefore unbiased in their evaluation of participants' responses), or they may have a particular area of knowledge or expertise that makes them suitable to evaluate the responses.
Accordingly, these teams may be assigned specific aspects of any responses to a negotiation's Requirements to evaluate. Teams can then provide a score reflecting their evaluation of the responses. Multiple teams can provide scores to different aspects of the same negotiation.
The creator of the negotiation can define negotiation Requirements. These typically take the form of questions to which participants respond, and usually solicit high-level information about a company. The person responding to the question can be external or internal to the buying company. External questions are answered by the suppliers themselves and usually request company information such the number of years in business or applicable certifications. Internal questions are answered by someone within the company and typically deal with aspects of a supplier's relationship with the buying company such as past performance or level of customer support. Requirements dealing with a particular aspect of the negotiation are grouped together into Requirement sections.
At any time prior to awarding the negotiation, a negotiation editor (the creator or any Collaboration Team member with Full access) can define a scoring team.. Members of the scoring team must be assigned to the Collaboration Team for that negotiation to be eligible for a scoring team. The same person can be on multiple scoring teams. Members of the team(s) can be added and removed until the scoring process is locked.
Once the scoring team has been defined, it can be assigned a section or Requirements to evaluate. When the negotiation has been closed, the team members access the negotiation and evaluate the responses to the Requirements for the section assigned to their team. While the scoring process is open, team members can see only the score values they themselves have entered. Once the scoring process is locked, team members can see their own and other members' score values.
Once a particular team has completed its evaluation and provided its score, that score is included with other Requirement scores to determine the negotiation winner. See Scoring Responses to a Negotiation's Requirements for information on how to score Requirements and how scores are calculated and used by the system.