evaluate your potential partner first. Outsource to them only if they successfully pass through your appraisal sieve.

Here are some important evaluation criteria and methods for assessing them: ---> Criterion: The OSP Should Be Web-Savvy Check if OSP has a website. If they do not, in all probability dealing with them will yield a bad experience. If they

have a website, check whether their postal address and telephone number are displayed on it so that they are physically

reachable. Give OSP credit if website has mostly text with limited graphics, has almost no animation, clearly explains what

OSP is doing and is easy to navigate. This implies detailed knowledge on website design, which increases their ‘web-savvy’

rating. Your CAD outsourcing is most probably going to involve transferring large amounts of data over web. This calls for an OSP

who is proficient with email.

To evaluate this, send OSP a message asking for more information and see if you get a response within 12 hours. The

response should be perfectly focused on your question. You have to be careful an autoresponder (ie, a web-based answering

machine) is not replying to you, so formulate your question to require a tailor-made reply. Subsequently send two more questions related to work you are considering giving OSP. Check whether these responses

too are timely and relevant. If OSP has a form on their website for sending them email, give them extra points (smart webmasters do not put their

email addresses on their websites to discourage Spam robots from finding addresses and sending junk mail to them). ---> Criterion: The OSP Should Have a Satisfactory Profile Email OSP a questionnaire that gathers a wide range of information on them. Decide whether you like what you find. This

questionnaire should cover address information, telephone number of individual dealing with you, company history,

“We are increasingly working in an Internet-driven market, and meetingtrak and etrak products have stayed ahead of curve to help our customers keep pace with demands of marketplace,” stated Bob Walters, gomembers’ panel expert. “Being able to harness new technology makes job of professional meeting planner and organizer much less cumbersome, and allows them to radically improve services and delivery. A number of TSAE attendees were pleased to learn about recent technological advances in meetings industry, and indicated a desire to utilize new technology.”

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