Supplier Qualification Model (SQM): A Quantitative Model for Supplier Agreements Evaluation

Abstract

Recently software outsourcing has increasingly widespread due to the valuable economical and technical benefits it introduced to the software development industry. Where the software development organizations adopt a third party to acquire a software project component (product, service). In the acquisition, process companies rely on the CMMI supplier agreement management (SAM) process area to select the potential supplier. Potential suppliers (vendors) are carefully selected through a dedicated process to ensure the delivery of high-quality and reliable services. Most of the published work in the context of how to evaluate and select the right supplier is based on a normal process with plain steps, nevertheless, no literature was reported to evaluate suppliers in a measurable way and select the potentials depending on a quantitative model. The purpose of this paper is to propose a practical quantitative model called the Supplier Qualification Model that enables the organizations to easily evaluate and select the potential suppliers through a measurable approach depends on monitoring and executing the SLAs of the SAM. The proposed model has been verified by implementing it through building an extension for one of the worldwide leading Agile management platforms according to Gartner (Microsoft Team Foundation Server). Multiple versions of the extension were implemented to target the major versions of Microsoft Team Foundation Server and validated by using them in 426 worldwide companies. This proves the suitability of the model to be used.