IT Outsourcing Roadmap Index

The vendor evaluation grid is a simple numerical tool to evaluate service vendors. The numerical evaluation will help to compare various vendors.

Before you can develop the evaluation sheet you must prepare the RFI document and establish the evaluation criteria.

The evaluation grid should be part of the RFI package. Companies will first carry out a self evaluation and later as you obtain more and more information about the companies during the process you can complete the company evaluation in the same grid. It will provide valuable information about how companies see themselves and how you perceive them as an outsider. If you carry out such evaluation regularly over a period of time you can see how the company and the relationship develops and how all this will influence the evaluation.

A sample evaluation grid is available for download here (MS Excel sheet). It is important to see that this example has served our purpose in a specific situation. The contents of the evaluation grid highly depends on your strategy and evaluation preferences therefore it has to be tailor made.