Evaluation Groups

Evaluation Groups can be thought of as silos or sections in which a Project Owner can use segment reviewers, documents, and criteria. 

Evaluation Groups give the Project Owner the flexibility to map documents and criteria to specific Reviewers. This allows the user to control document and criteria visibility appropriately across a team of evaluators or procurement staff.

One typical use for Evaluation Groups is setting "Technical Evaluation" and "Pricing Evaluation" groups, where only purchasers are assigned to the Pricing Evaluation group and all other reviewers are assigned to the Technical Evaluation group. This ensures that only the purchaser can view and score pricing while allowing technical evaluators to review all other documents and criteria. In essence, creating a two-envelope evaluation process.

Another common use for Evaluation Groups is for projects requiring a presentation by the vendor, where only the attendees of the presentation are allowed to score the presentation criteria. 

Evaluation Groups can be edited at any time from each Project Details page by navigating to the Evaluation Groups section and selecting the Manage button. 

To learn more about creating Evaluation Groups, see our How do I add or remove Evaluation Groups? page.

Evaluation Groups also give you the ability to run a multi-stage evaluation project by manually releasing the document and criteria to Evaluators in each Evaluation Group as required. In the example shown below, two Evaluation Groups were created: one for the Technical Evaluation and second for the Signed Forms Evaluation.

The green label symbolizes that an Evaluation Group was released which gives Evaluators access to documents and criteria. An orange label means that the current Evaluation group is being withheld (Evaluators cannot access documents and criteria).

Being able to release to Evaluation Groups on demand allows you to run a multi-stage process where each stage is evaluated in sequence or simultaneously. How the releases are staged is up to the Project Owner.

Please note:

• Withholding an Evaluation Group that was previously released freezes all the scores and will not allow respective Evaluators to make changes until the group is Released again.
• Every time you Release an Evaluation Group, the Evaluators in the group will receive an email notifying them that they can proceed with their evaluation.
• Bonfire does not Release or Withhold an Evaluation Group automatically. These actions are performed manually by the Project Owner or a Manager (please see our User Roles in Bonfire page for more info).