A vendor evaluation scorecard is easy to build and hard to keep using, and the failure is almost always the same: too many criteria, weights argued fresh every year, and a total with nothing to compare it against. Fixing those three makes the difference between a scorecard used at every renewal and one built once and abandoned by the second.
Five criteria, and why not more
Delivery, quality, price, responsiveness and compliance covers almost every supplier relationship a small business has. More criteria and nobody fills the card in; fewer and it stops discriminating between suppliers. The point is not that these five are perfect, it is that they do not change between vendors or between years, because a score you can compare beats a score that is precise.
The weights are where the argument belongs
Two people will usually agree within a point on whether a supplier delivers on time. What they disagree about is whether delivery matters more than price. Have that argument once, in the weights, rather than every year in the scores. On the worked example delivery and quality carry 30 each, price 20, responsiveness and compliance 10 each, totalling 100 so the result reads as a percentage.
Contributions, not just the total
Delivery at 8 against a weight of 30 contributes 24; price at 6 against a weight of 20 contributes 12. Showing each criterion's contribution is what makes a score actionable, because it names the thing to raise with the supplier. A single number tells you a supplier is mediocre without telling you what to ask for.
A threshold turns the number into a decision
A score with nothing to compare it against is trivia. Set the level below which a supplier goes on the review list, and the worked example's 74 against a threshold of 70 becomes a keep, while 66 becomes a conversation to have before the notice window closes. Set it where you would actually act, or it is theatre.
Questions people ask about vendor evaluation scorecard
What should a vendor scorecard measure?
Delivery, quality, price, responsiveness and compliance is a defensible default for a small business. Keep the same five every year; the comparability matters more than the choice.
How do we score fairly when one person deals with the supplier?
You cannot make it objective and pretending otherwise is how scorecards fail. Make it consistent instead: same criteria, same weights, same scorer, recorded each year. The trend is more reliable than any single score.
Should the supplier see its scorecard?
For the ones you want to keep, yes. A supplier told it scored 6 on price and 9 on responsiveness can act on that; a supplier dropped without warning cannot, and neither can its replacement.