4. The method of claim 1 , further comprising querying the supplier to determine whether the supplier wishes to modify the pre-populated response field.
1. A method for identifying sourcing event metrics for analyzing a supplier, comprising: a metric identification engine of a consumer computing device selecting a first previously created sourcing event, wherein two or more predefined metrics are associated with the previously created sourcing event; the metric identification engine of the consumer computing device providing a comment field and receiving comments related to a metric from the supplier; the metric identification engine of the consumer computing device populating a new sourcing event with the two or more predefined metrics, each predefined metric operable to trigger a response from a potential supplier; the metric identification engine of the consumer computing device further populating the new sourcing event with a second previously created sourcing event, wherein the second previously created sourcing event is used as a predefined metric of the first previously created sourcing event; the metric identification engine of the consumer computing device modifying one or more of the predefined metrics; the metric identification engine of the consumer computing device determining a weighting factor predefined for one or more of the predefined metrics; for each predefined metric having a fixed set of possible responses, the metric identification engine of the consumer computing device determining a points value predefined for one or more possible responses; the metric identification engine of the consumer computing device redefining a points value for one or more of the predefined metrics; for each predefined metric providing for a comment field, the metric identification engine of the consumer computing device assigning a points value to one or more keywords appearing in the comment field before receiving a response to the new sourcing event; a metric evaluation engine of the consumer computing device determining whether previously obtained data associated with the predefined metrics exists for each of a plurality of potential suppliers, and for each potential supplier: the metric evaluation engine of the consumer computing device pre-populating a response field associated with each of the predefined metrics where previously obtained data exists for that predefined metric, the metric evaluation engine of the consumer computing device querying the potential supplier for response data associated with the predefined metrics, the metric evaluation engine of the consumer computing device receiving a second set of response data in response to the query, the metric evaluation engine of the consumer computing device determining the points values earned for each of the predefined metrics based upon the second set of response data, the metric evaluation engine of the consumer computing device multiplying the points values for each of the predefined metrics by the weighting factor for the respective predefined metric to generate a weighted points value for each predefined metric, and the metric evaluation engine of the consumer computing device summing the weighted points values to generate an overall point total; and the metric evaluation engine of the consumer computing device ranking each supplier based on the overall point total and displaying the ranking to a user, whereby the user is able to select a supplier based on the ranking.