Honestly the biggest trap with vendor scorecards is people build a nice looking spreadsheet… and then never really use it properly.

What tends to work better is structuring it around 3 buckets:

Performance (hard data)
on-time delivery, defect rate, price variance, issue resolution time, etc.

Relationship / risk
responsiveness, capacity, financial stability, dependency risk.

Strategic value
innovation, sustainability, collaboration, future growth support.

Then weight them based on what actually matters to your business. Otherwise price ends up dominating everything even when reliability is killing you.

Excel works fine if you’ve got a small supplier base. Once you scale, the pain is usually:

• collecting data consistently
• tracking trends over time (not just snapshots)
• sharing scorecards with suppliers
• actually turning scores into improvement actions

If you want a starting point, here’s a solid free supplier performance scorecard Excel template you can use and adapt:
https://evaluationshub.com/_templates/supplier-performance-scorecard-free-excel-template/

But yeah — tool second, structure first.

If you want, happy to share a simple weighting example depending on your industry.