Competitive Bid Unawarded Reasons: Self-service setup

Standardize unawarded reasons to drive fair decisions and smarter sourcing insights.

When multiple stakeholders evaluate supplier bids, consistency matters. Predefined unawarded reasons help your team clearly document why a supplier was not selected. This creates a more transparent, fair, and data-driven sourcing process while simplifying decision tracking across your organization.

Why it matters

Standardizing unawarded reasons improves both compliance and clarity. Your organization can:

• Ensure decisions follow fair and unbiased bidding practices
• Capture consistent data for reporting and analytics
• Identify trends in supplier performance and sourcing outcomes
• Reduce confusion among evaluators during and after the bid process

Who it’s for

• System administrators who manage sourcing configurations
• Sourcing and procurement teams who evaluate supplier bids
• Program managers who need accurate reporting and audit trails

How it helps

This feature helps you:

• Provide clear, repeatable justification for supplier decisions
• Make evaluations faster with ready-to-select options
• Improve reporting with standardized data
• Support compliance with corporate sourcing policies

How it works

• You create predefined unawarded reasons in VMS Settings.
• Once configured, these reasons automatically appear when users evaluate suppliers during the bid process.
• Evaluators simply select the appropriate reason rather than manually enter explanations, ensuring consistency across all sourcing events.

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 setting up standardized unawarded reasons, you help your team make clearer decisions, support compliance, and unlock better insights from every sourcing event.

1. Select Preferences > VMS Settings > Competitive Bid. A Competitive Bid page displays.
2. Select the Un-Awarded Supplier Reasons link. An Un-Awarded Supplier Reasons page displays.
3. Select Add New. An Add New Un-Awarded Supplier 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.