Streamlining Value: TEC's Decision Support System

The traditional evaluation and selection process encompasses five stages, which can yield incredible value - and carry ample waste.

1. Research and Planning

Value: Identifying short and long term goals and securing management buy-in

Waste: Time spent gathering material and information to justify the new expenditure

Solution: TEC's research centers consolidate valuable information by offering analyst insight, marketing analyses, trend reports, and vendor and product information to support this first stage.

2. Requirements Identification and Proposal Creation

Value: Identifying requirements, distributing requests for information (RFI), and identifying vendors.

Waste: Sorting through biased, inaccurate, and irrelevant information; creating and distributing RFIs; finding appropriate vendors; and waiting for their responses.

Solution: TEC's vendor showcase also contains the descriptions of hundreds of vendors. TEC has thousands upon thousands of detailed functional and technical criteria in a number of different industry areas, which are available through our online decision support system (DSS), eBestMatch, or as stand-alone RFIs. This information has been vetted by our analysts to ensure accuracy. Vendor and product information are already grouped into their relevant enterprise software areas creating a ready-made long list of vendors that are immediately available for evaluation. Users save time and while accessing quality, impartial information.

3. Software or Service Evaluation

Value: Evaluating vendors to generate a shortlist of vendors that will perform online demonstrations

Waste: Errors resulting from using spreadsheets to compare answers from dozens of vendors. Formulae are often hidden causing errors when cells are moved or fields are typed over. Broken links between spreadsheets can also invalidate results.

Solution: TEC's decision support system (DSS) eBestMatch allows users to evaluate vendors in its knowledge bases and measure vendor appropriateness to user needs. With TEC's sophisticated algorithm, and by using a weighted average composite index (WACI), in addition to weighted averages, users can be confident that the results are accurate and that their shortlist contains the most suitable candidates.

4. Software or Service Selection

Value: Reducing the shortlist further to select vendors that will present on-site demonstrations, and selecting a winning vendor

Waste: Canned demonstrations by poorly matched vendors

Solution: What-if scenarios, sensitivity analyses, product comparisons, and product difference reports can be used to ensure the most appropriate vendors participate in demonstrations. These graphics and reports can also be used to create scripted scenarios that are given to vendors so they can demonstrate their respective products' capabilities as they pertain to your organization's needs. These reports can also be used to justify the final selection and the cost of implementation to management, and be used in final contract negotiations.

5. Implementation

Value: Acquiring and implementing the enterprise solution

Waste: Scope creep where the implementation grows beyond the project strategy

Solution: TEC's reports act as a check to scope creep and can be used as a reference to ensure that any additions to the enterprise solution package are necessary for the organization. TEC's Evaluation and Selection Services also gives organizations the additional support of TEC's analysts who will help oversee any stage of the project and its implementation to ensure that everything remains on track.

Impartial Information for Research and Planning