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.

UN Anti-Corruption & Human Rights 2022

As part of our mission, Trust Your Supplier allows organizations to manage a broad spectrum of subject areas to inform compliance with global regulations. We would like to recognize the work being done by the United Nations in the areas of Anti-Corruption and Human Rights. 

Over the next couple of days, the United Nations will launch yearlong campaigns to recognize the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Convention against Corruption. These issues impact areas such as financial, human potential, societal trust, and our future.  

Read more about the Cost of Corruption and how ‘dirty money’ breaks everything – and what we can do to fight back here: https://undp.medium.com/the-cost-of-corruption-a827306696fb  

Learn more about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights here: https://www.standup4humanrights.org/en/declaration.html  

#UnitedAgainstCorruption #IACD2022 #UNCAC20 #STANDUP4HUMANRIGHTS 

TYS Implementation Case Study

Now available is a Trust Your Supplier case study on a telecoms company’s approach to managing change when implementing a new supplier onboarding process. Read how the organization worked with suppliers and internal teams to roll out the Trust Your Supplier platform and the outcomes they are finding as a result.

Read the Case Study

 

SIG Podcast Episode with Moody’s Analytics & Trust Your Supplier

The latest episode of the Sourcing Industry Landscape podcast focuses on how procurement and compliance teams of enterprise organizations are coping with geo-political, regulatory, and industry risks. 

Host Dawn Tiura, SIG President & CEO discusses the Trust Your Supplier and Moody’s Analytics partnerships for illuminating supplier risk with Gary Storr, Trust Your Supplier’s GM, and Enrico Aresu, Moody’s Analytics Director of Compliance & Financial Crime Industry Practice Lead for DACH and BeNeLux. 

Gary describes the evolution of TYS, and why we’ve evolved from an onboarding platform to a full ecosystem of risk & compliance data & tools. Partnering with risk Intelligence data providers, such as Moody’s Analytics, allows TYS users to stay on top of a wide array of compliance regulations, such as the new Human Rights legislation (SCDDA) from Germany.  

Listen or watch at: 

SIG:  https://sig.org/preventing-risk-and-compliance-struggles-keeping-your-buyers-night-enrico-aresu-moody%E2%80%99s-analytics  

iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/preventing-risk-and-compliance-struggles-from-keeping/id1352492997?i=1000585400855 

YouTube: https://youtu.be/LnkmRSeo6Gw 

Welcome Nick Picone

We are excited to welcome Nick Picone to the Trust Your Supplier team! Nick joins us as the Vice President of Advisory Practice and is responsible for worldwide sales execution and advisory practice strategy.  

Bringing more than a decade of experience in the business software industry. For the last six years, Nick has served as an independent management consultant and spend management strategy advisor to Fortune 500 companies, hedge funds, private equity, and institutional investors. Before that, he was the Director of Strategic Sales at Coupa Software as the company scaled to an IPO. View his full bio here.   

“My main priority is ensuring the success of our customers as we rapidly expand TYS’s footprint across the globe. Our supplier management platform defines disruptive innovation and will play a critical role in securing the future of the global supply chain. I look forward to working alongside our leadership team as we take TYS’s success to the next level.” 

Nick earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration with an emphasis in Finance and Entrepreneurship from Baldwin-Wallace University.  

We are delighted that Nick has joined our executive team to ensure the success of our customers, increase network adoption and establish new partnerships. 

Germany Supply Chain Due Diligence Act: A Guide for Suppliers 

Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz (Lieferkettengesetz or LkSG) comes into effect in Germany from 2023. Known in English as the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (SCDDA), the law mandates companies with offices in Germany to conduct due diligence on their supply chains to protect human rights and the environment.   

For our Trust Your Supplier buyer organizations, we’ve created a quick guide to help your suppliers understand and respond to customer requests in such a way as to make sure that their organization benefits from the process, too. 

This guide can be downloaded here to share with your suppliers. 

Team Member Spotlight: DevOps Team

“DevOps is not a goal, but a never-ending process of continual improvement.” ~Jez Humble 

As a SaaS company, we are continually rolling out new features to improve the experience and outcomes for our customers. Each time enhancements are made to the code of our blockchain platform, our goal is to make updates without sacrificing reliability or disrupting the customer experience. 

A smooth transition is accomplished with the help of our DevOps team – Sandeep Matharu and Joel Vemula. Together with the collaboration of our developers and IT operations teams, they have automated the deployment of new code, which is also scanned for security vulnerabilities. They are responsible for critical components of the infrastructure and are instrumental in combining code and managing & maintaining the TYS application and its components in development and production environments. 

Communication and knowledge sharing are fundamental to the successful deployment of the new code. As a team, they architect together and then divide & conquer daily operations or work on bugs in the code..  

Sandeep brings a passion for self-learning as he is presented with new challenges. In particular, he has enjoyed learning about blockchain technology since joining the TYS team. 

Joel enjoys the teamwork it takes to successfully troubleshoot bugs and errors, and gains satisfaction from using automation to make everyone’s job a little easier. 

Together they both agreed that their most significant learning opportunity so far has been deploying the TYS application to the China region. Their research taught them a lot about deploying the TYS application and its components, in a highly regulated AWS China region.    

Sandeep Matharu and Joel Vemula are a valued part of the Trust Your Supplier team. Their expertise and diligence give customers a flawless upgrade to new TYS tools and features. 

SIG Global Executive Summit 2022

And that’s a wrap! #SIGfall22 was busy, exciting, and very well-orchestrated. 
 
Our Trust Your Supplier leadership, Sai Nidamarty, and Gary Storr had a great time sponsoring lunch (look at that dessert!) and bestowing the gift of the force (Star Wars Legos) to one lucky winner. They also had wonderful conversations about how Trust Your Supplier brings trust, data, and tools that help Procurement and Supply Chain organizations achieve successful and strategic supplier management.
 
Thank you to the entire Sourcing Industry Group (SIG) team for all your hard work in making this event a success.

supplier.io 2022 Supplier Diversity Report

For the fifth year, supplier.io launched a survey aimed to define the supplier diversity industry for the supplier diversity professionals managing and growing their companies’ programs. 

“The State of Supplier Diversity Report revealed big changes in the primary drivers of supplier diversity. More and more companies see programs as a core component of their company culture, and executive and board support is at an all-time high. However, signs of disconnects appear between executive leadership support and solvable challenges that seem to remain for supplier diversity practitioners, notably in implementing scalable processes.

Download the 2022 report to learn more.  

Supplier.io is now available on the Trust Your Supplier network. Learn more: https://trustyoursupplier.com/portfolio/supplier-io/ 

UN World Food Day 2022

This Sunday is the UN’s #WorldFoodDay, a day set aside to raise awareness about the need to create more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive agrifood systems. 

As a supplier management network that specializes in helping organizations connect with trusted suppliers, we know first-hand how disruptions such as climate events, Covid-19, and conflicts such as the war in Ukraine have affected the supply chain. For those already on the edge of malnutrition, these events have made food security even more out of reach. 

The UN has put together incredible resources with stories of #FoodHeroes and how businesses can help play a part in making sure everyone has regular access to enough nutritious food. 

Join an event or browse their recommendations to help make a difference! 

https://www.fao.org/world-food-day/en