We keep re-appointing the ones who let us down

Everyone in the office knows who walked off the last job, whose applications were fiction and who finished on time - but it lives in anecdote, and anecdote doesn't survive contact with a tender deadline. The enquiry goes to the usual list because assembling a better one takes time nobody has that week, and the low bid from the firm that burned you last year wins because the burn was never written down.

A performance record is minutes per job: delivery against programme, commercial behaviour, quality, would-we-use-again, captured while it is fresh. It turns the tender list from a habit into a decision, and it gives the cheapest-price conversation a second column - what the cheap ones actually cost last time.