Ask HN: How do you manage vendor selection process?

2 points by eranation 10y ago ↗ HN

Perhaps most of the startups here don't do this enterprise-ish due diligence process of selecting a 3rd party vendor (or it boils down to a SO / HN question (like this one ironically) or simply looking for the most starred GitHub project)

But in Enterprise scenarios, choosing a backup solution, a BI solution, any 3rd party solution (open source + support or fully commercial) needs some due diligence selection process (getting RFPs, asking questions, installing demos, following up with vendors on all types of criteria when there is a time crunch to find the right vendor in a limited time)

Well, this is part of my day job, and I found out that excel spreadsheets seems to be the only standard way of doing it.

It has several issues, which are pretty obvious if you ever tried to use Excel as a collaborative database with many people (we can't use Google Docs for some reason) e.g. if you filter it and save on the shared drive, everyone sees your filter. also you can't share it directly with vendors as you don't want them to know which other vendors are competing and you don't want them to see their answers either. (and your private comments)

My question is this - is there any software out there that helps you choose software? e.g. something that comes out of the box with ready made criteria checklist, and lets you expose a URL for vendors to answer questions, track status of questions, put %VENDOR_NAME% placeholders so the question looks like it's directed to them, etc. Also you can prioritize features / questions and rank the response etc.

Also it will let you team member rank vendors based on functional and technical criteria and give the CTO / CIO a dashboard with a final decision.

Sounds like something any CIO / CTO / technical purchasing department will be happy to have.

Seems like an open niche, is there any SAAS product (or self hosted) out there to do this? Or should I just take any ticket / helpdesk system and manage questions as tickets?

2 comments

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MalcolmDiggs 10y ago ↗

I don't have experience in this area, but from your description it sounds like something you could use a CRM (like Salesforce) for.

If you envision a vendor as what the CRM would typically refer to as a "lead", then you should be able to use the CRM to add info fields to the lead, track it through different phases (like due-diligence, etc), contact the lead using premade templates (like you suggested above), and resolve or delete the lead at the end. At the same time you'd be able to view all your leads (vendors) at once, search through them, search by field, etc.

Hope that helps.

jlamba 10y ago ↗

@eranation: We are a Techstars startup (Vetted) focussed on vendor selection and on-boarding. We have automated 80% of this, plus supplier on-boarding (e.g., compliance checks, contracting workflow, security review). We have found that this is a real need and are now live at two Fortune 500 firms among others.

We follow the lean startup methodology and would love to partner with you on remaining 20% of the functionality. Will you be open to a quick call? Jag (jl at thevetted dot com).

Thanks @eranation.