General Situation: Your international firm has decided to do a major procurement of a multi-million dollar Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERPS). This will be a turn-key operation in which the winning vendor will operate the system and train our IT operators and firm staff before it will then be put up for a re-compete in 10 years.It is now soliciting bids from ERPS firms that would like to win the procurement. In exploring this procurement with potential vendors during an open session, several of the vendors requested that your firm provide some more definitive information of how their bids will be evaluated. You have already shared the basic information processing and transmission requirements that the new system must be able to support.However, the bidding vendors would like specifics of how their proposals will be evaluated.

Model: In response to their request you advise that you will be employing a systems approach to evaluate the proposals, specifically using the Multi-Factor Evaluation Process.The four primary criteria will be Technical, Networking, Cost, and Management. Technical will be evaluated based on the sub-criteria of Hardware, Software, Time Trials, and System Integration. Software (SW) is further broken down into the following sub-sub criteria: Accounting and Finance (Acct/Fin) SW, Marketing (Mkt) SW, Supply Chain Management (SCM) SW and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software. Cost will be based on the Initial One-time Cost and the annual cost to run the system for the next 10 years; Networking will be based on Speed and Accuracy; lastly, management will be based on Experience, Responsiveness and Professionalism.

Criteria, Sub-criteria and Sub-Sub criteria weights: You elect to keep the weights proprietary. This is to add some uncertainty to the procurement and also to keep them from gaming the system.

Proposals: Three system integration vendors elect to bid on your proposal.You organize a source selection evaluation board (SSEB) to evaluate the three proposals. The SSEB has members who are experienced engineers and procurement specialists who have managed similar projects and provided the requisite inputs on scores and the weights of criteria and sub-criteria. Their scores on the respective sub-criteria are shown below along with the weights for each criteria and sub-criteria.

Criteria Weights: Technical (.2); Cost (.4); Networking (.1); Management (.3)

Sub-criteria Weights:

Technical - Hardware (.2); Software (.3); Systems Integration (.2); Time Trials (.3)

Cost -One Time Purchase (.3) ;Annual cost for each of the 10 years (.7)

Networking - Speed (.4); Accuracy (.3); Reliability (.3);

Management - Experience (.4); Responsiveness (.3); Professionalism (.3)

Sub-Sub Criteria Weights:

Acc't/Fin.3

Mkt.2

SCM.2

CRM.3

Requirements: (a) Use the MFEP to evaluate the three proposals using the scores provided to you from your SSEB (below); (b) Advise whether or not it is a robust or sensitive solution; and lastly, (c) if sensitive indicate what qualitative factors would you recommend be considered before a final decision is made and a vendor selected. Ensure that you show all work so that if a math error is made you can receive partial credit for your work (i.e. ensure that you have an audit trail with steps so that I can see what you have done clearly).

Scores from the SSEBVendor AVendor BVendor C

Hardware908080

Acc't/Fin SW70 8090

Mkt SW907080

SCM SW806070

CRM SW907080

Systems Integration809090

Time Trials809080

One time purchase cost809085

Annual Cost909590

Speed708075

Accuracy808070

Reliability908590

Experience959090

Responsiveness959080

Professionalism809095