How to Better Identify and Mitigate Risks in Call for Tenders: Towards a Dedicated Risk Ontology

When preparing a commercial offer concerning technical systems, suppliers working in engineer to order can either make a detailed design job or just decide key solution choices. With a detailed design, if the customer accepts the offer, the supplier has a good confidence in its ability to provide a solution matching offer contents because requirements have been studied in details. With key technical choices, it is not the case, and the supplier takes the risk of not being able to provide an adequate solution because requirements have been just superficially studied. The goal of the communication is to propose and discuss the key knowledge elements in order to manage this kind of supplier risk when preparing the offer. By management we mean, according to ISO 31000, identifying, assessing and processing risk. The proposed key knowledge elements are a risk taxonomy and a risk mitigation action taxonomy. Actually, risk management relies fully on human expertise, these modeling elements will allow companies to design a knowledge-based system that can assist the human in charge and improve commercial offers quality.