Within Synaptic Research you have the ability to filter - which is to remove all contracts that don't meet the client's requirements. Ranking is done if there is more than one contract left, once filtering has been completed, to help decide which is the most suitable contract to meet the client's needs.
(N.B. Ranking isn’t compulsory. You can go straight from the filtering stage to generating a suitability report by using the Report tool on the menu bar of the filtering page.)
The categories of ranking items which are available depend on the type of contract. The most common ones are as follows:
- Desirable features This lets you mark features which you would like contracts to have in order to meet client requirements, but where the lack of that feature is not serious enough to warrant exclusion of the contract from the list. (If a feature is absolutely essential, then you should filter on it in the previous stage so that contracts are eliminated if they don’t offer it.)
- Financial strength Allows ranking of contracts based on the financial strength rating of each provider, as assessed by AKG or Moody’s.
- Fund link stats Allows ranking of contracts on the number of fund links they provide, and the number of sectors in which they have a fund link.
For each chosen ranking feature, a contract is given a score. All the scores for each contract are added up and the contract with the highest score is the 'most suitable' to meet the client’s needs.
