This NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation & Assessment Tool (NEAT) is now available to NelsonHall clients and is also available for a period free-of-charge to buy-side organizations through NelsonHall and through its partners SIG and SSON.

The tool shows how vendors are positioned overall, and within four distinct market segments (i.e. areas of focus designed to meet specific business requirements). These are Employee-Centric Learning, Multi-Country Standardization, Learning Vendor Management, and Learning Process Transformation.

Vendors of Learning BPO covered by this NEAT are Accenture, Capita KnowledgePool, Delta College Corporate Services, Expertus, GP Strategies, IBM, Infosys, NIIT, Raytheon Professional Services, Seertech, Talent2, The Learning Factor, and Xerox Services.

The NEAT tool for Learning BPO is part of NelsonHall's "Speed-to-Source" initiative. The tool sits at the front-end of the vendor screening process and consists of a two-axis model: assessing vendors against their "ability to deliver immediate benefit" to buy-side organizations and their "ability to meet future client requirements".

The NEAT evaluations are based on a combination of interviews with the vendors and their clients. The vendors are scored against a wide range of criteria, establishing a number of scenarios, each representing a different business situation or client business need.

To add further value, the NEAT tool enables buy-side organizations to input their own weightings and tailor the Learning BPO dataset to their specific requirements across almost 50 individual vendor evaluation criteria. Using the interactive web-based tool, sourcing managers can configure the NEAT evaluations according to their own priorities and business requirements for service offerings, delivery capability, customer presence, benefits achieved, and other criteria.