Freeze the Comparison, Not the Working Document
A supplier comparison is a moving object. A revised offer arrives, a quantity changes, and someone corrects the delivery condition. The working document should accommodate those changes. The decision record needs to preserve what was actually compared. That distinction shaped an internal procurement implementation documented in my public portfolio. This article discusses its anonymized design…
The article discusses the need to differentiate between a supplier comparison and a working document in procurement processes. It emphasizes that the working document should accommodate changes, while the decision record should preserve the original comparison for transparency and accountability. The author presents a design pattern for a procurement system that introduces separate lifecycles for these objects, ensuring integrity and providing a clear boundary for when a decision is frozen and can be acted upon.
The system should validate eligible offers and policies at this transition, create a snapshot, and connect the human choice to it, allowing for amendments or replacements if needed, without silently rewriting the earlier context.
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