A sourcing event executes a decision. It does not discover one.
Going to market is the reflex when a cost looks wrong or a renewal is close. It is also slow, it spends goodwill with providers you may want to keep, and it is an expensive way to find out your existing agreement was reasonable. Sourcing is worth running when the evidence already says change is warranted.
Where this sitsSourcing is one of the paths the Execute stage can take, and it is chosen on evidence rather than by default. The Execute stage.
Supplier outreach is not the first meaningful step.
- 01BaselineWhat is actually true about our technology environment?
- 02BenchmarkWhere does our position hold up, and what should inform the decision?
- 03DecideWhat should we do, and can we defend it?
Only then does anything here become the right answer, and sometimes the answer is that nothing needs to change.
Your Technology Advisor runs the event. A worker keeps it moving.
Your Technology Advisor owns the strategy, the market, the negotiation and the provider relationship, and answers for how the event turns out.
Vera, the sourcing coordinator, coordinates the requests and collects every response. Vera sends a provider request only when a person releases it, and a discovery or clarification email only after a person has approved the draft. Vera does not recommend a provider or make the decision.
Verasourcing coordinatorWhat Vera does, and will not do
Who pays, and what it does not buy.
Where a provider pays NarrowGateX a fee, we disclose it to the client in writing. It does not change the recommendation. How a recommendation is reached.
Which is why the sequence on this page is not a formality. If the recommendation is settled before the market is approached, a provider's fee has nothing left to influence.
Six things that have to hold for a comparison to mean anything.
Requirements from the record
What you actually run, at which sites, under what obligations. Requirements written from the estate rather than from a wishlist are the difference between comparable responses and a pile of proposals.
A defined market
Which providers are asked, and why those. Chosen from what the benchmark evidence showed exists, with the incumbent included so the comparison is real.
One set of criteria
Agreed before responses arrive, so the standard cannot move to fit whoever answered best. Scoring against criteria written afterward is not scoring.
Responses, side by side
Commercial and technical differences laid out on the same basis, including the parts that are hard to compare and why they are hard.
A decision package
The recommendation, what was considered and rejected, the tradeoffs, and the reasoning. It stays attached to the record rather than expiring with the project.
Follow-through
The new agreement in the record, with its renewal and notice dates checked daily after signature, when most sourcing processes go quiet.
What survives the event.
Most sourcing processes leave a signed agreement and very little else. The reasoning evaporates, and the next cycle starts from nothing.
- Requirements traceable to the estate they came from, not assembled from memory
- Provider responses that can genuinely be compared, on criteria fixed before they arrived
- A recommendation with its alternatives and reasoning preserved, that a person will defend
- A record of who was approached, what they offered and why the selection went the way it did
- The new agreement's renewal and notice dates, checked from the day it starts rather than rediscovered at renewal
Around this.
Before the sourcing event, the evidence.
Establish what is true about your environment and how it compares, and find out whether going to market is the right move at all.