FAQ: How do questionnaires play a role in supplier compliance & risk management?

Frequently Asked Question: How do questionnaires play a role in supplier compliance & risk management?

How do questionnaires play a role in supplier compliance & risk management?   Trust Your Supplier (TYS) questionnaire features range from supplier self-audit forms to predictive questionnaires. 

Learn more about these and other questionnaire features with these resources: 

TYS Questionnaire Features Infographic 

The “Q” Word blog post

What Is The Real Cost Of Missing Or Inaccurate Data?

by Sai Nidamarty, Trust Your Supplier Co-Founder & CEO

Let’s get the cursory narrative regarding the cost of missing data out of the way first. 

We have all heard Peter Drucker’s business maxim, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,”. It is a timeless guidepost of how we run our businesses. By the way, Peter never actually said that, but that is a story for another day. 

 Then we can turn to the various articles and studies over the past few years reporting that bad or poor-quality data costs the U.S. economy $31 trillion annually. That’s a big number, and so is the finding that 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years. 

The above are all facts and verifiable. But what do they really mean? What does missing or inaccurate data really cost on a practical, everyday level?  

There are better venues for a deep analysis than the limitations of an article or blog post. My focus today is to start a dialogue enabling you to transition data strategy from a broad horizon concept to an actionable on-the-ground understanding. In other words, you already know that data is important and that there are consequences for missing or inaccurate data. What’s needed now is to answer the question, what will you do about it? 

Data Challenges 

In an upcoming webinar, we will convene a panel of industry experts and thought leaders to closely examine data challenges from the following three critical points: 

  • Data consequence 
  • Data culture 
  • 3-Point centralized planning & supplier oversight data framework 

When we talk about “data consequence,” we are not talking about broad-stroke generalizations but a fundamental and accessible understanding of impact. 

For example, a news article reported that due to a data glitch, Hawaiian Airlines charged dozens of customers “hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card fees.” 

One customer reported being “mistakenly charged more than $150,000,” even though they have a “$10,000 limit on their Hawaiian Miles credit card.”  

While another customer was charged $674,000 for airline tickets, others obtained free travel vouchers by paying taxes and associated fees. You can imagine the frustration when the airline canceled their flights. 

Beyond a financial mess, the airline’s reputation also took a significant hit. How do you measure that in dollars? 

Unfortunately, examples like the one above are not rare or isolated incidences limited to the travel industry. Nor do most cases present themselves in such a prominent and noticeable way. Data quality erosion is an even bigger problem because you may only recognize it once its impact is evident on a larger, less manageable scale. 

Creating The Right Culture 

Given the volatility of supply networks in the post-pandemic world, it isn’t surprising to hear the C-Suite talk about supply chain visibility, resilience, and risk management. 

A recent post by Nick Picone regarding a contentious issue about inflationary price increases between a large, national grocery chain and Frito-Lay underscores the importance of data visibility and transparency. 

But how do you get to the point of leveraging tools and technology to move from data darkness to data insight and understanding? 

A May 2021 article in Procurement Insights highlighted the importance of creating a data culture starting at the C-Suite level. According to the author, CEOs must “recognize the importance of data beyond a conceptual perspective and see it in a practical bottom-line context.” Citing everything from “customer satisfaction and regulatory compliance” to employee empowerment, they make a strong case for “becoming a data-driven organization.” 

The 3-Point Supplier Data Plan  

Partner, Mitigate, Comply is at the heart of the 3-Point centralized planning & supplier oversight data framework. Going forward, I will call it the 3-Point supplier data plan.   

The 3-Point supplier data plan focuses on providing tools and data for organizations to efficiently partner with trusted suppliers, mitigate risk, and ensure ongoing compliance.  

In addition to data consequence and culture, during the upcoming webinar, the panel will get into the specifics of the above 3-Point plan highlighting how you can introduce it to your organization. Register to save your seat. 

The “Q” Word – Questionnaires

A favorite character in the James Bond series (other than James himself) is Q. Q always has these amazing hi-tech gadgets that save James from a certain demise at just the right time. Explosive alarm clocks, the Knife Shoe, exploding pens, a submarine Lotus Esprit, and of course the attacking sofa. He also has little patience for James and his laissez-faire attitude.  Q is cool.  

For your suppliers, what’s not cool is the “Q” word: Questionnaires.

Suppliers receive and return countless questionnaires containing dozens to hundreds of questions from each customer. Many of these questions are similar from customer to customer with slight variations and various formats. Just google “supplier questionnaires” and you’ll be overwhelmed with many template options and suggestions of what to include in your questionnaires. 

So as a procurement organization, what should you include in your questionnaires? And how do you keep them up to date? Key global risks, evolving market conditions, geopolitical issues, and new compliance mandates require revisions to your questionnaires to collect crucial pieces of information from your suppliers. This is necessary to mitigate any risk to your organization. 

Each time a company sends out a questionnaire or sends an updated questionnaire, the supplier must respond to each customer separately. The queue for having your specific questionnaire updated and returned can be quite lengthy, therefore creating a lag in the transfer of information. This lag leads to stale data and a lack of visibility to manage your company’s risk in current market conditions.

So, what’s the solution?  The “S” word: Standardization. Trust Your Supplier (TYS) has pulled together a conglomerate of major buying organizations to develop a set of questionnaires that are standardized. These questionnaires cover industry, location, and buyer-specific issues that allow each organization to assign the relevant questionnaires to their suppliers. And these questionnaires are kept updated to reflect new requirements and regulations.

Here’s an example of how it works: 

A set of questionnaires can be assigned to a supplier by a customer. Once those questionnaires have been completed and published by the supplier, the procurement team can review the answers. But there’s more!  Suppliers can then share the same completed questionnaires with other customers…with just a click of a button. So instead of sending the same 200 answers separately to each customer, the supplier now just needs to focus on any unique questions a customer may have. This dramatically reduces the supplier’s administrative burden as well as the onboarding time and keeps their information current and accurate.  

Let’s suppose this supplier has added a new product and now they are working with conflict minerals. No problem. The supplier can update the Conflict Minerals questionnaire and once published, the system will automatically notify every connected customer. The supplier’s new motto is now: “Do Once, Share with Many.”

These standardized questionnaires offer additional benefits to buyer teams. The TYS approvals workflow can be customized and automated with each questionnaire. Each answer can be “scored” based on your internal risk threshold. Any answer that does not align with your company’s preferred score will then be directed to the appropriate team role for further review and approval. This allows your team to focus on undesirable answers rather than spending time reviewing all answers.

Another TYS feature that softens the blow of the Q word is Questionnaire Groups. Depending on the supplier segmentation strategy, buyer organizations can use a targeted approach to send relevant questionnaires to a configured group of suppliers. These groups are customized by the buyer team and then assigned as a group to suppliers that fit into that category (i.e., location). This simplifies the questionnaire assignment process for the buyer team. 

And the newest TYS feature is Predictive Questionnaires. Buyer teams can create a set of rules that will predict which questionnaires should be assigned to a particular supplier. This is tremendously valuable as new compliance regulations and laws come into play throughout the world, and provides the opportunity to reach more of your supplier base without further manual outreach.

Ultimately, standardization and automation result in benefits for both supplier and buyer organizations. The reduction in the onboarding cycle time allows transactions to occur faster and there is reduced administrative effort on both sides. Buyer organizations can also then benefit from having full visibility into their supplier base for strategic decision-making and risk management.  

Check out a real example of how quickly suppliers can complete their profiles and questionnaires on the TYS system.

“Glocal” Supplier Management – Balancing Global and Local Requirements

For enterprise organizations, globalization adds complexity with a need to assess suppliers across a broad spectrum of subject areas to ensure compliance with both global regulations and regional operating requirements. Local regulations and laws require procurement organizations to take into consideration any specific needs, often complicating the process of engagement or risk management. 

How do you ensure suppliers are compliant and operating responsibly no matter where they are in the world?   

Trust Your Supplier is a “Glocal” solution that allows procurement organizations to manage multiple, complex risk areas efficiently while establishing relationships with suppliers anywhere in the world. Here’s how… 

  1. Standardized Questionnaires – TYS is guided by a Governance Board of Fortune 500 companies that provided input to our standardized compliance questionnaires. By collaborating across and within industries, these questionnaires were built to support global, local and industry requirements while reducing the number of overall questions suppliers are required to complete.
  2. Custom Questionnaires – Organizations may have unique regional and global requirements for risk management. TYS offers custom questionnaires to support any regulatory requirements that may not be covered with a standardized questionnaire.
  3. Questionnaire Groups – Buyers can select any combination of questionnaires to form a Questionnaire group. These groups can be based on common requirements for location, product or service, or other features. During the onboarding process, suppliers can easily be assigned into the appropriate Questionnaire Group, simplifying the process and ensuring the relevant questionnaires are required for that supplier. This strategy targets segments of suppliers for customized risk assessments appropriate for that segment.
  4. Integrated Risk Data – TYS partners with industry-leading third-party validators that offer a variety of risk data on companies from around the world. This information is integrated into supplier profiles for an enriched view of each supplier. 

 This flexible, standardized approach, combined with integrated third-party risk data, provides procurement organizations with a 360° view of their suppliers no matter where they are located in the world. 

FAQ: What is the Importance of Standardization?

Frequently Asked Question: What is the importance of standardization?

Trust Your Supplier has endeavored to bring together buyer organizations across and within industries to determine the best practices and key questions needed to ensure supplier questionnaires address compliance and risk perspectives. Our questionnaires were built with key regulatory questions that address global, local and industry specific requirements. 

These standardized questionnaires and workflows reduce onboarding time by allowing suppliers to focus on any unique questions without having to readdress shared questions. This gives suppliers a better experience overall, while reducing time, effort and costs for both parties. Internally, organizations can move in an agile way to get the suppliers they need and meet their goals & deadlines. 

Watch this short video to learn more. https://trustyoursupplier.com/resources/cycle-time/ 

FAQ: Why Supplier Management?

Frequently Asked Question: Why did Trust Your Supplier choose to tackle supplier management?

We realized that there was a large gap in the reliability of supplier data. With today’s supply chain risks, volatility in supply, and the increased regulatory situation, traditional methods to discover, onboard and monitor suppliers can’t keep up with the pace of changing information. 

Fundamental to all supply chains is the “supplier”. Globalization requires proper vetting and risk assessment of suppliers across a broad spectrum of subject areas to ensure trust, transparency, and compliance with global regulations 

The pandemic has demonstrated that a lack of supplier diversity and reliance on one or two concentrated suppliers can lead to a total supply disruption, higher costs, and process inefficiencies. As part of their material risk and qualification assessments, investors, buyers, and consumers are requiring suppliers to demonstrate ESG and sustainability initiatives.  

Our parent company, Chainyard, believes that a blockchain-powered solution such as Trust Your Supplier is foundational to the future of supplier management. 

Good Advice From Joyce Harkness

In the United States, we will be celebrating Thanksgiving this week. Our time is spent sharing food and other traditions with family and friends.  As I’ve been making preparations, I remembered some family-themed advice given to me by Joyce Harkness. 

Joyce joined me on an episode of the Procurement Block podcast and as a single, working mother offered up this tip for managing work and family:  “We have a shared online family calendar. At the beginning of each school year, we would put the usual school and family events in the calendar. And then it helps us then have conversations about who’s attending what.”

Joyce was such a pleasure to have on the show. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to her episode on Supplier Information Management, you can check it on below.

Happy Thanksgiving!

https://trustyoursupplier.com/procurement-block/podcast-s1e4/ 

Good Advice: Supplier Financial Health

Sometimes we have a tendency to put off important, regular tasks as a way of avoiding the possibility of negative information.  Not scheduling a medical check-up  or delaying a review of your bank statement and bills doesn’t change what’s there. It merely limits the time you have to take any needed actions.

A few weeks ago, Eric Evans and I had a conversation about supplier financial health. He gave me and our podcast listeners some really good advice to look “at getting your digital house in order, data hygiene, and then really hooking this into your workflow and process to make it much more automated so you don’t have to think about it.”

Get the boost you need to tackle his suggestions for visibility & monitoring of the financial health of your suppliers – listen here:

https://trustyoursupplier.com/procurement-block/podcast-s1e3/ 

Procurement challenges that could impact business profitability and continuity are solved by Trust Your Supplier

By Praveen Rao
Managing Director, Supply Chain Solutions and Partnerships
IBM Industry Platforms

Today’s businesses are operating in an increasingly complex world in which risk and volatility are putting new pressure on day-to-day business operations. A study by IBM indicates businesses are spending more than 50 percent of their revenues on procuring goods and services from their supplier base. Leading procurement organizations must excel in the fundamentals of reducing cost, ensuring compliance, driving performance and ensuring innovations in the supply base.  

In today’s procurement world, a keystone in the sourcing strategy is to have vendor management methods that foster engaging with the right suppliers at minimal cost. This involves managing all aspects of supplier lifecycle from discovery and qualification to onboarding and monitoring.  

Continuous monitoring of the supplier performance in today’s fast-paced and global environment, along with supplier rationalization as a key piece of strategy, must be considered by procurement organizations to innovate in driving better supplier management. In our conversations with large procurement organizations, these are some of the top procurement challenges for 2021 and beyond: 

  • Reduce spend cost
  • Lack of resiliency in supply chains
  • Lack of risk mitigation around onboarding unfavorable suppliers
  • Outdated procurement systems
  • Lack of analytics for insights around supplier performance
  • Not enough focus on sustainability and diversity of supplier base
  • Dark purchasing that happens outside the approved procurement processes 

So how do procurement organizations drive change to face these challenges? Trust Your Supplier (TYS) works with a network of enterprise buyer organizations to bring digital transformation to their industries. As an integral part of their strategy, the TYS blockchain platform is bringing transparency and supplier visibility at every touchpoint. The supplier owned profile, with information needed for onboarding and qualification, can be cross referenced against industry recognized validators to reduce your organization’s overall procurement cost and to support compliance activities such as diversity, sustainability, cyber security, and anti-corruption. 

TYS boasts a rich marketplace of business partners that cater to evolving risks such as:  supplier Identity, firmographics, financial, sustainability, cybersecurity, governmental sanctions, compliance and screening for undesirable entities.  

Furthermore, TYS has partners into your supply chain resiliency and potential disruptions that could arise from unplanned events such as a pandemic or natural calamities. Marketplace providers offers continuous monitoring capabilities to ensure that your risk data is kept up to date with evolving market conditions. These solutions are offered through free basic data sets, bring your own license, and commercial license purchasing options. 

To learn more about how Trust Your Supplier can help with your organization address these top procurement challenges and bring innovation to your supplier management process, please contact us to speak with an expert.   

Praveen Rao
Email:[email protected]
Twitter:https://twitter.com/prao1