Weighted Point Method

A technique which can be used to analyse and evaluate a service or product, so as to help select the best outcome for the desired criteria. Products and services will consist of multiple criteria, each of which will influence the expected performance. This technique is useful as part of a procurement process where a range of suppliers are offering services and/or products. The customer will identify a range of key criteria and will assign a value (i.e. a weighting, so that the total ‘weights' add to 100%) for the relative importance of each criterion. The service or product from each supplier is then scored as a performance measure, which might be a rating or a ranking, against each of the criteria and this is then multiplied by the weighted value to provide a score. The scores of each criterion are then totalled to give an overall score for the service or product being offered and typically the highest overall score would be that which is purchased, unless two or more scores where within a stated percentage range (for example, “If any final scores are within 15% of each other, then those supplier products or services will be re-evaluated”, or similar).

The use of this type of technique provides for an open and transparent approach to deciding on purchases and reduces the change of corruption, bribery and unwarranted favouritism.

A limitation of this approach is that the values applied to weightings is still subjective, but if a team is involved in determining and agreeing the weightings then this does help to provide a more informed decision, although trying to ‘trade-off' one criterion with another to deliver appropriate relative values can be very challenging.


There might be an initial essential constraint criterion which must be achieved before proceeding to the more detailed assessment weightings. For example, there might be a contract requirement that a service or product has to be in place by a certain date. If this is not going to be made available or delivered by that time then any submission by a supplier would be discounted, however, in practice this would have been made clear at the initial request / tender stage and a supplier would have been unlikely to have bothered to have carried out any further work preparing a submission because this is time and effort that would be spent more productively elsewhere.