Do you think about a company’s culture or organisational fit when choosing a supplier? Can you, should you?
In my almost 32 years of Local Authority experience I am still intrigued to learn how important company culture is to make long lasting relationships with suppliers. If I look back at all the ITTs I worked on, both developing and evaluating, as then as a bidder, they were all designed to be scored against criteria that could differentiate the offerings and be assessed against strict objective measures; this was obviously the essential nature of the tender design and would stand up to scrutiny of rigour and fairness if challenged. But during the process how much did people’s own personal feelings towards a company’s approach or their people still influence their final decision? If it did, is this wrong or inevitable?