Vendors can provide great results and poor results, depending on who you ask. Rating your vendors can help your organization determine the best vendors to select based on ratings from within your vendor management system. CobbleStone’s Contract Insight® software allows users to score vendors on specific categories like performance, on-time delivery, invoicing accuracy, and quality compared to other vendors in your system. Contract Insight rating scorecards are used to rate vendors and companies you do business with to help you make better decisions about which vendors to use in the future and what companies you have successfully or unsuccessfully conducted business with. Learn how to easily rate and review vendors in Contract Insight with this guide.
To rate a vendor in Contract Insight, begin by choosing a vendor to rate and searching for the vendor record. The vendor record (shown above) displays details about that vendor like primary contact, address, email, and more. To rate this vendor, click on “Rate This Company” shown on the left “Actions” toolbar.
To rate a vendor, you must first choose the “Rating Type/Category” (shown above). This will allow you to choose from rating options like delivery, quality, responsiveness, risk, or other options you configure in your system. For this scenario, John Smith will be rating the quality of ABC Supplier, and he has chosen to rate their quality as “5” out of “5”.
The “Target Rating” represents the expected rating you’d like to see for this category and the “Rating Score” represents your actual rating. This could also be explained as the “Target Rating” being set to 5 stars and the “Rating Score” being your choice out of 5 stars. If you think the quality of ABC suppliers last product set you received was perfect (5 out of 5), you would choose “5” for “Target Rating” and “5” for “Rating Score”. It is typically recommended to keep the target score consistent across categories and ratings for accurate comparisons.
The Vendor Rating & Score Card Summary helps system users understand the overall ratings for this vendor. In this case, three different users have rated this vendor on its quality. John Smith has rated this vendor “5 out of 5” twice which shows some consistency in the high quality ABC Supplier delivers.
The “Peer’s Average Rating” (shown above) compares the vendor being assessed with other vendors in your system that are rated on the same category. ABC Supplier has a rating of “3 out of 5” compared to other vendors in the system, which means they have an average score in regards to quality compared to other vendors that have been used.
Vendor Rating Trends give users a visual (in this case, a bar chart) of how the vendor was rated over time. Once this vendor has been rated over a period of time, trends will develop for each category to help users determine if the vendor’s ratings have increased or decreased. This will help with future decisions on which vendors to do business with by identifying if the supplied products or services are improving or declining.
Get started with better business decisions today. For more information on rating vendor performance in Contract Insight, contact a CobbleStone Support Representative today.