This animated overview digs a little bit deeper and focuses on the interaction between the user organization, which drives the evaluation process, and one or more offerors. It also illustrates the document flow.

If you were responsible for a product evaluation, you would start out with downloading a suitable Evaluation Specification from the repository. As the next step, you would customize the Evaluation Specification by adding, modifying or removing requirements. The result would be an Evaluation Specification that exactly meets the specific requirements of your organization.

When the Evaluation Specification has been approved, a Private Request For Proposal (RFP) will be generated. The Private RFP forms the basis for the product comparison, since it contains all information that is necessary for score computation.

Once the Private RFP exists, you can generate a Public RFP, which will be made available to offerors. In contrast to a Private RFP, the Public RFP only contains information that the offeror needs to provide requirement fulfillment statements.  An offeror uses the RFP Response Editor (RFPREdit) to associate requirement fulfillment statements with requirement statements.

After the RFP Response Due Date has been reached, you would import all RFP Responses into the Evaluation Project in order to perform a product comparison. The Evaluation Project Editor (EPEdit) automatically computes scores. Thus, you can easily see, which products come closest to meeting your organization's requirements.

The whole process is highly automated and is based on exchanging computer files. Of course, you can always create reports to provide users with an adequate representation of information.