Where Fantasy Football meets Procurement

by Robert Braverman

At the start of September, every football fan’s mind was occupied with pulling statistics and strategies to arm themselves for Fantasy Football. For me, Fantasy Football began to infiltrate most of my waking hours, including seeping into my thoughts during the work day. As an eProcurement consultant with Mercell, I began to see commonalities between the decisions I was making in drafting my team and the evaluations that procurement professionals made when awarding a bid.  I knew the two had to be able to coexist peacefully in my day.  

My solution was to use Mercell’s Source-to-Contract platform to indulge my fantasy addiction. Whether you are selecting the best bidder for your upcoming project or choosing the perfect fantasy QB, Mercell Source-to-Contract provides a powerful framework for data-driven decision making. The first step was to log-in to my account and create a solicitation, naming it “Robert’s Fantasy Quarterback Selection”.

Next, I set a schedule. I needed my solicitation to be evaluated and a quarterback to be awarded before my upcoming drafts. Once that was set, I had to find some evaluators. What is any great/questionable fantasy decision without the support of your like-minded buddies? I assigned a few other football fanatics to join me and weigh in with the statistics and opinions they have researched. This way, I could leverage my colleague’s expertise to determine my pigskin-tossing champ. I sent off invitations to their emails and let them know the scope of work for this particular solicitation. 

Then, I created a custom questionnaire and weighted each question to be worth 10 points. If I had used the software last year to source my quarterback, I would have been able to import that template. However, as this is my first time using the software to grade football players, I will be sure to save my questionnaire as a custom template to pull from next year. I made five criteria: Average touchdowns per game, TD/INT ratio, Career completion percentage, average passing yards per game, and 2021 auction value. All of these were set up in question format, so “quarterback” accounts could submit their information, and all responses could be scored by my evaluators. 

“Quarterback” is in quotations there, as I created my own faux supplier accounts for each team to submit their quarterback’s statistics, as I am sure Josh Allen has routes to run and plays to memorize before his next big game. Fortunately, it doesn’t cost me any money to register as a supplier or receive new business opportunities, as registration for all suppliers is free on Mercell Source-to-Contract.

I created five new suppliers within our system: the Bills, the Chiefs, the Ravens, the Chargers, and the Packers. I know there are more fantasy relevant quarterbacks, but I wanted to mix veterans, highly drafted quarterbacks, and young quarterbacks into my spread. I then had each supplier (team) and fill out their QB’s stats accordingly within the solicitation. Once all questions were answered, I opened the vault of answers and moved into the evaluation phase. 

My evaluators got a notification that it was time to evaluate, and they dutifully logged in and gave their opinions on my quarterbacks. They graded on the scale that I customized for this evaluation, and were able to leave helpful comments. 

Once all evaluations were complete, the software combined the scores and I was presented with a table as well as a colorful bar chart, both detailing the breakdown of each quarterback’s scores. This was a great way to visualize how all my suppliers performed in evaluation, and I was informed of the highest and lowest ranking quarterbacks.

Finally, now that I had all information, I finalized all evaluations. This locks the scores into place, including any consensus scores that may have been put into place (to account for biases or missed information). The solicitation automatically moved forward into the “awarding phase” and it was time to select a quarterback. Looking at my scores and my bar chart, it was clear that there was a single winner above all the others. Mercell Source-to-Contract ranked the offers based upon their scores, and I selected the #1 scorer, Patrick Mahomes from the Kansas City Chiefs. Once Mahomes was selected and saved, all other quarterbacks were automatically categorized as not awarded.

If you would like to see how I continued this solicitation by sending out awarding letters and a bid tabulation in only a few clicks, please click here and myself, or a colleague, can walk you through all of the powerful features of our evaluation and awarding tool!