Choosing the best vendor for your medical device project requires you to do a thorough vendor evaluation and understand every vendor’s potential. How do they fit into your needs? How do they compare and contrast with each other? What are their key strengths? Will they complement your company, objectives, and culture? How about their impact on your profit margins?
If you have more than one vendor or supplier that fits the bill, you need to select the best one for the job. For the rest, you can create a comprehensive vendor directory that can help you if you need potential suppliers in the future. One of the tools Waddell Group often uses to help companies select the best-fit vendor for their medical device project is the Vendor Evaluation Matrix.
This tool combines qualitative and quantitative analysis, strategy, and math (yeap!) to objectively compare your medical device vendors and determine the best option based on your needs, budget, and other criteria.
Why Vendor Evaluation Matrix Is Critical For Medical Device Vendor Assessment
In an industry where quality and standardization are the norms, Vendor Assessment and Evaluation play a critical role. An experienced medical device vendor who is well-versed with the product, process, regulations, and guidelines needed to bring said product to market safely and quickly can:
- Help ensure you comply with all regulations before releasing any products.
- Provide valuable advice for product design, as they have likely worked on similar projects before and know how best to approach them.
- Handle unexpected problems that arise during development as they have greater resources at their disposal.
- Find solutions to problems that arise during product development when necessary.
- Meet deadlines without sacrificing quality or safety.
Other Benefits Of Using The Vendor Selection Matrix For Your Medical Device Company.
The Vendor Evaluation Matrix, also known as the Vendor Selection Matrix or the Vendor Competitor Matrix, can be beneficial in more ways than just helping you compare and contrast different vendors and suppliers. It helps you:
- Make well-informed decisions about each vendor.
- Easily identify the most suitable (low risk, high profit) vendor for your needs.
- Negotiate better prices or terms with current and potential vendors using concrete data from the matrix.
- Identify potential issues and areas(if any) where you can make improvements in your partnerships with existing vendors.
- Gain insights into what works best for you when working with vendors.
- Develop mutually beneficial long-term business relationships.
- Create a comprehensive vendor listing/directory of vendors specific to your needs that you can come back to again and again.
Using The Vendor Evaluation Matrix For Your Project Or Company. Plus, An Example
Once you have a short list of vendors you’d like to partner with for your medical device project, it’s time to compare and contrast to select the best one.
Start by determining the most important criteria that will go into the matrix.
Since we work with medical device companies, we generally go with:
- Price: What is the price per unit and total cost of the purchase? The long-term and short-term costs?
- Quality: How do the customer feedback and references look for each vendor? What does your test and examination of their sample products/services say?
- Compliance: Do they have knowledge of and comply with applicable regulatory bodies like EN ISO 13485, US FDA, etc.? What are their accreditations?
- Delivery: What is their delivery process? Evaluate their speed, accuracy, and reliability.
- Scalability: Are they flexible enough to accommodate changes in demand, special requests, or customization options for unique business needs?
- Project Management Structure: Do they have a documented quality system in place? How do they plan, execute, and control their projects?
The questions listed above are an example of what you can include and assess for in each criterion. You can make it as simple or complex as you want by adding more parameters based on your company or project goals and needs.
When selecting the right fit vendor for a medical device company, our expert project management consultants also take into account other factors like company culture, profitability, support, history, supply chain, manufacturing site, etc. And if any of them are non-negotiable or highly critical for a particular component or medical software, we add it to the matrix.
As Dr. Ray Carter, the author of Practical Procurement rightfully says, “What the COVID-19 emergency illustrates, is the importance of engaging suppliers with sufficient resources and access to working capital to continue to operate, gear up if necessary to meet demand and survive crises.”
Create a scoring system based on the criteria.
While there are many variations to the Vendor Comparison Matrix, Waddell Group uses weighted scores to compare and contrast vendors and select the best one. The reason; this kind of matrix is more useful when dealing with both general information and deal breakers (like the highest quality of component or the necessity of a certain accreditation) that go hand in hand with a medical device project.
Here’s how it works:
The criteria are listed on one side (Y-axis), and the weight + vendors on the other (X-axis).
Weights (from 0 to 1) are assigned to each criterion depending on its importance to the project.
For example, for medical device components, quality is almost always critical. And as such, carries a high weight (1 being the highest). If another criterion, like scalability, is not as important for this particular project, it will carry a lower weight (say, 0.2). And so on for each criterion.
Once the appropriate weights are assigned, every vendor is given a rating from 1 to 5 (with 1 being the lowest and 5 the highest) for each criterion on the list. This rating determines how well each vendor does for a particular criterion. So the ‘better’ a vendor scores for a specific criterion – the higher score they receive.
Once all the criteria have been scored (Score for criteria = Weight assigned to criteria x Rating of criteria), the final score for each vendor can be calculated using the following formula:
Final score = Score for criteria 1 + score for criteria 2 + score for criteria 3 + score for criteria 4 + score for criteria 5
The scoring in action:
| Criteria | Weight | Vendor A | Vendor B | Vendor C | |||
| Rating | Score | Rating | Score | Rating | Score | ||
| Price | 0.8 | 4 | 3.2 | 2 | 1.6 | 5 | 4 |
| Quality | 1 | 4 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 3 |
| Compliance | 0.9 | 5 | 4.5 | 4 | 3.6 | 4 | 3.6 |
| Delivery | 0.8 | 3 | 2.4 | 3 | 2.4 | 2 | 1.6 |
| Scalability | 0.2 | 4 | 0.8 | 3 | 0.6 | 5 | 1 |
| Project management Structure | 0.5 | 1 | 0.5 | 3 | 1.5 | 4 | 2 |
| Final score | 15.4 | 14.7 | 15.2 |
Select the best vendor based on the results.
In principle, the vendor scoring the highest – in this case, Vendor A – will be the primary supplier for that particular component/service.
For the Evaluation Matrix to work well, you need to ensure ratings still reflect objectively, even if you already prefer one vendor over another. Also, consider different factors in order to identify what matters most in making your decision.
You can also use this scorecard to regularly review and update your assessment process so that it reflects the changing needs of your organization over time.
The success of your project and your bottom line depend on choosing the right vendors for your medical device project. From lead times to safety risks, your suppliers can impact the overall operations of your business and, as such, should be brought on board only after a thorough evaluation and comparison.
If you need any help with that, Waddell Group has expert project management consultants with a proven track record and decades of experience ready to lead.