Preserving the Evidence Behind Procurement Decisions, Not Just the Working Comparison

A supplier comparison changes over time as revised offers, quantities, and delivery terms come in, so the working document must stay flexible. The decision record, however, needs to capture exactly what was compared when the choice was made. The article describes an anonymized procurement design that separates the original supplier document, its normalized interpretation, the working comparison, and a frozen decision snapshot. Using an invented example, it shows how a per-pack price and a per-unit price can be misleading without an equivalence rule covering specification, unit, and conditions. The author argues that snapshots should be taken at the point a human acts on a comparison, with later corrections recorded as amendments rather than silent rewrites. The piece makes no claims about measured savings or new deployments.