The Evaluation Project Manager will take care that time as a precious resource is effectively used. It is therefore recommended practice to perform a pre-qualification of RFP Responses.

When a RFP is widely distributed and the sheer number of vendors and products in a particular domain would simply go beyond the scope of reasonable effort on the evaluating organization's side, the Evaluation Project Manager will be keen to only include those RFP Responses in the Evaluation Project that have the potential to make it on the shortlist. For example, the evaluation of a Content Management System (CMS) or a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) would fall into that category. There are hundreds of products and hundreds of vendors.

The Private RFP forms the basis for an Evaluation Project. Before an RFP Response is imported into the Evaluation Project, the pre-qualification function can be used to have the tool compute a preliminary total score. For example, the Evaluation Project Manager may decide that a product's preliminary score must at least amount to 75% of the achievable score. The preliminary score is computed solely based on the offeror's data and is automatically computed. The achievable score (maximum score) is computed based on the presumption that all requirements are fully met.

If the product's preliminary score is lower than the threshold, the RFP Response would not be included in the Evaluation Project. 

Of course, an RFP Response can be removed from an Evaluation Project at any time later on, should it become evident that a product will not make it into the group of finalists that will be considered for purchase.