Competitive Bid Award Reasons: Self-service setup

Standardize award reasons to highlight winning decisions and strengthen sourcing insights.

Selecting a winning supplier is just as important as documenting why others were not chosen. Predefined award reasons help your team clearly explain why a supplier received the bid. This ensures consistent decision-making, improves transparency, and strengthens your organization’s sourcing strategy.

Why it matters

Standardizing award reasons helps your organization:

• Clearly justify supplier selection decisions
• Ensure a fair and defensible competitive bidding process
• Capture consistent data for reporting and performance analysis
• Identify what drives successful supplier outcomes

Who it’s for

• System administrators who configure sourcing settings
• Procurement and sourcing teams selecting winning suppliers
• Program managers and analysts who track supplier performance and trends

How it helps

This feature helps you:

• Communicate why a supplier was selected in a clear, consistent way
• Speed up decision-making with predefined options
• Improve reporting with structured, comparable data
• Reinforce fair and policy-aligned sourcing practices

How it works

• You configure predefined award reasons in VMS Settings.
• These reasons appear during the supplier selection process, allowing users to quickly select the most appropriate justification for awarding a bid.
• This ensures every award decision is documented consistently and supports downstream reporting and audits.

Action steps

• Administrative access to VMS Settings
• A configured Competitive Bid module
• Understanding of your organization’s sourcing policies and evaluation criteria

How to steps

By standardizing award reasons, you give your team a clear way to capture why suppliers win bids, improve reporting accuracy, and strengthen the integrity of your sourcing program.

1. Select Preferences > VMS Settings > Competitive Bid. A Competitive Bid page displays.
2. Select Awarded Reasons. An Awarded Reasons page displays.
3. Click Add New. An Add Awarded Reason page displays.
4. In the Name field, enter a label for your reason.
5. In the Code field, enter an abbreviation for your reason.
6. Optional. In the Description field, enter an explanation for when the reason should be chosen.
7. Select the Active checkbox.
8. Select OK.

The reasons you created are available to users on the Create SOW from Bid page.