The Evaluation Process is one of the more complex processes. It involves several roles and numerous activities (process tasks).

The following figure shows the high-level Evaluation Process. All activities in the process represent sub-processes.

The Evaluation Process is designed to support multiple iterations. It is recommended practice to plan for two iterations when a sophisticated product is the subject of an evaluation.

Iteration 1 serves the purpose of determining suitable products that qualify for iteration 2. An Evaluation Specification which contains the most critical requirements would be made available to offerors. Products that meet all critical requirements would qualify for iteration 2. This time, the Evaluation Specification would include all requirements deemed necessary to determine the most suitable product.

This Evaluation Process model does not cater for a hands-on trial of products on the final shortlist. In many cases, products on the shortlist would be installed in a test environment in order to perform some pre-defined test cases and to ascertain whether the outcome of 'paper-based' evaluation was correct. We have deliberately left out this aspect, since the focus here is on 'paper-based' evaluation.

We have used Intalio|BPMS Designer to model a high-level view of the Evaluation Process. This tool is one of the more advanced ones and we can highly recommend it. As graphical notation, we have used the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), which has gained wide industry support over the past few years.

There are two pools in the process diagram, representing the participants in the business process. The pools are sub-divided into lanes, which represent roles.