The Best Quote, Scored on a Number Nobody Sets
Our quotation comparison scores each supplier on price, delivery time and a vendor rating, with weights you choose that must sum to one. Two of those three are real. The third is a number on the quotation that nothing fills in, and when it is empty the score uses 3.5.
The conclusion first
Set the vendor-rating weight to zero and put its share on price and delivery time. The rating factor is a field nothing populates, and where it is empty the comparison substitutes a mid value — so leaving it weighted at the default means four tenths of your supplier selection is decided by a constant.
A quotation comparison is the one place in procurement where software can genuinely make a better decision than a person, because a person comparing six quotes on three dimensions is doing arithmetic badly. So it is worth knowing exactly what the arithmetic is.
What the comparison does
You choose a category and a request for quotation, and you set three weights: one for price, one for delivery time, and one for a vendor rating. The system checks that the three sum to one and refuses to run if they do not, which is a small piece of rigour worth noticing — a weighting that does not sum to one produces a score nobody can interpret.
It then pulls every quotation for that category and that request, in your organisation, excluding any that have been rejected, and scores them. The result is stored — a score, a ranking and a recommendation against each response — and a quotation can be marked as the best quote.
That is a real comparison engine with a persisted result, and it is more than most systems in this bracket attempt.
Where each of the three numbers comes from
| Factor | Source | Default when missing | Real? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | The quotation's total amount | None — a quotation always has a total | Yes |
| Delivery time | The delivery time on the quotation | 7 | Yes, where suppliers state it |
| Vendor rating | A numeric field on the quotation | 3.5 | Only if somebody types it |
The rating is the problem, and it is worth being precise about why rather than simply calling it empty.
It is a number on the quotation, not on the supplier. So it is not a supplier's standing reputation being brought to bear on a decision; it is a judgement somebody would have to enter, by hand, on each quote, before running the comparison. Nothing computes it. Nothing carries it forward from the last time you dealt with that supplier.
A constant with a weight on it is not a criterion. It is a way of making price count for less.
And there is a supplier performance model in the product — the obvious place a rating would come from, with fields for on-time delivery, quality and pricing trend. It has never held a value. It is dead code rather than an unfinished feature, and we say so wherever it comes up.
What the default weighting actually does
Three quotes, default weights, empty ratings
A factor identical across every candidate does not change the ranking — it flattens the spread between scores, which makes close decisions look closer than they are. The ranking is not wrong; the confidence it projects is.
Read the last line of that table again, because it is the practical harm. The ranking you get with a dead factor at 40% is the same ranking you would get without it. What changes is that the winner's margin looks small, so a buyer reading the scores concludes it was a close call when on the criteria that actually varied it may not have been.
The other thing the comparison cannot see
It compares header totals. One number per supplier.
That is adequate when every supplier quoted the same basket, and misleading when they did not — the cheapest total may be the one that omitted a line, substituted a grade, or quoted a different quantity. Line-by-line comparison is the thing competitive sourcing actually needs, and it is not available here for a structural reason worth understanding on its own: quotation lines are not stored as rows. That is covered in The Quote Lines That Are Not Rows.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- A weighted comparison across price, delivery time and vendor rating, scoped to one category and one request for quotation, excluding rejected quotes.
- Validation that the three weights sum to one, so a meaningless weighting is refused rather than scored.
- Persisted results — a score, a ranking and a recommendation per response — and a best-quote status on the winning quotation.
- Requests for quotation with relational line items, sent to selected suppliers, with responses recorded.
- Requisition approval enforced before an order can be raised from any of it.
What it does not do
- Any computed vendor rating. The field is on the quotation, nothing populates it, and the comparison substitutes 3.5 when it is empty.
- Supplier performance scoring. The model exists, has never held a value anywhere, and is dead code rather than a roadmap item.
- Line-by-line comparison across suppliers. The score is computed on the header total.
- Any check that suppliers quoted the same basket.
- Sealed bids, panel scoring, or any evaluation involving more than one assessor.
Not ours, by choice
- The weight validation and the persisted ranking are real engineering and we would rather have them than not. The criticism is one factor, not the mechanism.
- If you do enter ratings by hand, consistently, the factor becomes real. Almost nobody will, which is why the default matters more than the capability.
- Nothing here is Egyptian. It is the arithmetic of a weighted score with a dead input; Egypt is where the competitive-quotation habit is strongest among our readers.
What is not built for Egypt today can still be built for you
Anything described above as not built is a statement about what ships in the standard product today — not a limit on what AWRA OpsHub can do in Egypt. Kenya's eTIMS integration and its maintained payroll engine exist because Kenyan clients needed them and commissioned them; neither appeared by itself. The same door is open here. If ETA e-invoicing, an Arabic right-to-left interface, a bank or mobile money feed, a statutory return format, a rule your own operation needs that the standard one does not have, or a link to a system you already run is what stands between you and a decision, tell us and we will scope it as a build — written spec, timeline and price — before you commit to anything.
ETA e-invoicing and e-receipts
Document structuring to the prescribed format and submission against the Authority's interface, including the part vendors skip — rejection handling, resubmission, and a daily report of sales with no registration identifier.
Arabic interface, banks and payments
Arabic text with right-to-left layout and bilingual document templates, plus bank feeds and local payment gateways wired into the Payments Register.
The operational work, which is what most commissions actually are
An extra approval stage in a chain that does not match the standard one, a custom field set on employees or assets that only your sector needs, an expiry that has to block an order rather than send an email, a report your board asks for in a shape nothing produces, or a scanner or weighbridge feeding the goods-in door. These are the commissions we are asked for most often and the smallest ones we quote — and unlike a revenue-authority pipeline, none of them waits on a regulator.
Payroll and statutory returns
An Egyptian payroll engine with income tax bands and social insurance contributions, producing schedules in the layout your filing body expects rather than a spreadsheet rebuilt each month.
Systems you already run
The accounting package, CRM, online store or custom database you intend to keep — connected through our API so a fact is entered once and appears everywhere it is needed.
How it works: you describe the requirement, we return a written scope, timeline and cost, and once agreed it is built into your environment and maintained as part of the product. No roadmap slide, and no pretending in a demo that something exists when it does not.
Tell us what you need integratedFour questions about any quote-scoring feature
Where does the supplier rating come from?
A good answer sounds like
A computation from delivery and quality history.
What it actually means
Ours comes from a field somebody types. Ask this before you accept any weighting a vendor recommends.
What value is used when a factor is missing?
A good answer sounds like
The candidate is excluded, or the factor is dropped and the weights renormalised.
What it actually means
Substituting a mid value silently is the common shortcut, and it converts a criterion into a constant.
Is the comparison on totals or on lines?
A good answer sounds like
Lines, matched across suppliers.
What it actually means
Header totals cannot detect an omitted line, and an omitted line is the most common reason one quote is cheapest.
Can two people score independently?
A good answer sounds like
A panel, with each assessor's scores kept separate.
What it actually means
Ours cannot. For donor-funded or public buying that is usually a requirement rather than a preference.
Set your weights deliberately, once
Two numbers that sum to one, decided by your commercial team rather than inherited from a default. It takes ten minutes and it is the difference between a scoring tool and a decoration.
Set the weightsFrequently asked questions
Should I enter vendor ratings by hand?
Only if you will do it consistently for every quotation in every comparison. A rating entered on some quotes and not others is worse than none at all, because the ones you left empty are scored at 3.5 and quietly compete against the ones you rated honestly.
What weights would you actually recommend?
Whatever reflects your commercial reality, summing to one across price and delivery time with the rating at zero. For most buyers that is heavily price-weighted; for anyone whose stockouts are expensive it is not. The important part is that somebody decided it rather than accepting a default.
Does the comparison exclude expired or withdrawn quotes?
It excludes rejected quotations and scopes to one category and one request for quotation. Anything else — a quote past its validity, or one that arrived against the wrong basket — is on you to reject first, and rejecting it is the mechanism that removes it.
