Charles Dominick, of Next Level Purchasing, recently posted a question to the Strategic Sourcing & Procurement Group on LinkedIn that has been getting a LOT of attention:

“Should you share your selection criteria and weightings with suppliers?”

Needless to say, there are some very strong opinions for and against sharing this information. A few of the best answers from each camp are below the fold.

Open Proverbial Kimono

“I have again shared the selection criteria and the fact that they are weighted. The importance of doing this is to leverage the supplier expertise by discussing the criteria and asking for comments. These conversations often will lead to finding out things about the supplier and industry practices that you may not have otherwise uncovered.”

“The reasons to be transparent to suppliers go way beyond the immediate RFx and touch on the continuing relationship we must put in place with suppliers. If you don’t trust them to deal fairly with you, you should not be dealing with them. The attitude that suppliers are enemies that have to be constantly watched and checked is based on old history. The new relationships have to be partnerships, not adversarial. Otherwise, we end up in the old win-lose game.”

“Suppliers need to know what you need them to accomplish. It is a waste of everyone’s time to wade through pages of irrelevent bid information because the evaluation criteria was not communicated.”

Keep Cards Close to Your Chest

“I think that the selection criteria should be published with the tender. However i don’t see much value in also publishing the weightings allocated to each criterion. Keeping the supplier guessing as to what’s more relatively important is, in my opinion, more likely to induce a balanced and useful response rather than one artificially tailored to impress the selection panel that may or may not reflect their true capabilities.”

“I do think one needs to be careful when sharing this type of information to make sure that the suppliers do not skew the information they are providing, and it is good to have a mechanism in place to detect when this is happening. This would include comparing the current submission with past submissions and looking for proof points.”

By providing complete disclosure “you paint yourself into a corner where you cannot change, even if you learn something through the solicitation process which even the most experienced procurement professionals often do.”

There are a lot more insights in the thread, so I would encourage you to take a look at the full discussion. And of course, your perspective would be a welcome addition to the dialog.

Justin Fogarty is Managing Editor of Supply Excellence and community manager ofAriba Exchange. For any questions or feedback on the blog or its contributors, Justin can be reached at jfogarty[at]ariba.com.