What do Purchasing personnel look for in deciding which vendor to select when buying product?

Question

Some of the obvious purchasing requirements are price, quality, delivery, service, capabilities, etc. Is there a list of requirements in priority in de-sending order?

Answer 1

Different types of procurements will have these criteria in different orders.  For commodity goods, things that are of a fairly standard quality and are indistinguishable from those provided by your competition, price, time to deliver and service are the main considerations.   If you produce a unique or especially useful version of something that others also produce, but yours is better or worse than the competition, then you would look for procurements to a tight specification if you are the higher quality producer, or procurements where price is the main factor if yours is good enough, and the cheapest.

A procurement is an event of purchasing a given quantity of a given set of products or services.   Often large companies and government organizations require bids for commodity items and services, and issue requests for proposals for custom work or products where each company in the industry provides a unique style or "flavor" of the items being purchased.

Examples are paper and trucks.  Paper can be specified in a way that allows vendors to compete on price, delivery and service, while providing a virtually identical product.  You can issue a specification for the kind of paper you want.  Its bond weight, its color, its ragg content, etc.  That takes quality out of the decision and lets you focus on price and service in the competition for the business.

Trucks on the other hand are all somewhat unique from vendor to vendor, but many different manufacturers may be capable of providing a different truck that meets the basic needs you have.  We can then establish a core set of requirements that make a proposed truck eligible for consideration, but allow cost to be one factor, along with features, reliability ratings, delivery date, convenience of service on the truck etc. also be part of the purchasing decision.

So you need to know a bit more about what they are looking to buy, and what they plan to do with it, before you can organize the criteria you have listed in a particular order.

Answer 2

no, but price, delivery, quality, service are certainly at the top of the list