{"id":19,"date":"2026-03-25T14:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T18:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nestorsoftware.com\/multi-criteria-evaluation-without-the-spreadsheet-tax\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T14:15:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T18:15:00","slug":"multi-criteria-evaluation-without-the-spreadsheet-tax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nestorsoftware.com\/?p=19","title":{"rendered":"Multi-criteria evaluation without the spreadsheet tax"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Every category manager has built the spreadsheet at least once: columns for price, lead time, quality history, ESG score, financial health. Weights at the top, weighted sums at the bottom, one row per supplier, color coding for the winner.<\/p>\n<p>And every category manager has also experienced the moment when someone asks: <em>can we change the weights and see what happens?<\/em><\/p>\n<h2>The hidden cost of post-hoc scoring<\/h2>\n<p>The mechanics of weighted scoring are simple. The governance is hard. Specifically:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If weights are set <strong>after<\/strong> bids come in, the process is reverse-engineering a preferred outcome.<\/li>\n<li>If weights are set <strong>before<\/strong> but never published to suppliers, suppliers can&#8217;t optimize their offers against the criteria that matter.<\/li>\n<li>If scoring is done in a spreadsheet by one person, the audit trail is whatever that person remembers when asked six months later.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>What changes when it&#8217;s done live<\/h2>\n<p>When weighted scoring runs inside the auction platform \u2014 weights locked at event open, scores updating with each bid, ranking visible to suppliers \u2014 three things happen:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Suppliers stop optimizing for price alone and start trading across criteria. A supplier who can&#8217;t win on price might decide to commit to a shorter lead time, because they can see exactly how much that moves their score.<\/li>\n<li>The award decision is mechanically defensible. There is no spreadsheet to misplace.<\/li>\n<li>Buyers can run sensitivity analyses in real time: &#8216;if we shifted 5 points from price to ESG, who wins?&#8217; That&#8217;s a strategic conversation, not a clerical one.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>The math is unchanged. The fact that the math happens publicly, in real time, is what unlocks the behavior change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Weighted scoring isn&#8217;t new. What&#8217;s new is being able to do it transparently, in real time, while suppliers are still bidding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestorsoftware.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestorsoftware.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestorsoftware.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestorsoftware.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestorsoftware.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestorsoftware.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestorsoftware.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestorsoftware.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestorsoftware.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}