Some of the key drivers for business owners in their decision-making when buying a product are the relevance of it, demands and costs. Your business might be at the starting line of making a major decision but you may feel like there are too many different ways to approach it. It is true that there are many different paths to take to reach one of the many outcomes. Thus, this is a guide to show a very logical decision making process and it is up to you to follow it exactly or not. Each and every business is unique in the way they operate. Like when you walk up a stairs, sometimes you skip a step and sometimes you don't. So, feel free to plug in and out your own steps to better fit your company.

1.     Conduct research to discover required change in the company

• Research can be short or extensive depending on the scale of the issue or problem.
• Points to be wary of are: watch your spending and periodically update the research question to check for its relevance.

2.     Recognise an issue or a problem and plan to solve it

• Once research is completed, a number of issues should be raised. Here, you and your team should brainstorm and draft the ways to tackle this problem.

3.     Specify the requirements

• Each problem is different from one another and requires different ways to overcome it. List out the details to solve the matter.

4.     Search for suppliers

• A second research is done to find for people who provides the service or product that is needed by your company.
• Don’t be stuck on the big names. Dig for more small names that could provide the same goods and service at a lower price. Who knows; a new partnership could be formed in the process.

5.     Proposal submission

• A more hierarchical and formal business procedure to inform managers and board of directors.
• This step can potentially by long-winded but a way to avoid it is to have a more horizontal chain of command. Another way to omit this step is to have authority bodies to hop on board from step 1.

6.     Choosing of suppliers

• Probe and ask for quotes from all your potential suppliers. Get a general understanding of the price and cost to provide the product or service.
• Choose a supplier that not only the best at providing the service or product but also compatible with your business.

7.     Ordering

• Contact the supplier of choice and order to scale.

8.     Performance review

• This is the most important step of the decision making process.
• Once the deal is done, you should look through the effectiveness of the new service or product through surveying. Record the raw data in both quantitative and qualitative form.
• Only from this step that you can figure out if the amount of time spent and decision made is worth it or not.

These are the 8 steps and methods which I think are logical and systematic but as I said in the earlier section, there are many paths to achieve your business goals. Real-life decision making is nothing close to being clean cut.

Remember to always keep records of your track and stay organised because at the end of the day, the outcome is suppose to be for the better not the worse.