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.

Tales of TYS Superheroes: Supplier Discovery

Here’s a little end-of-week humor. 

 This comic strip is a fun way to showcase a problem and a solution around an organization’s need for supplier resiliency. Now, more than ever, enterprises need a trusted base of suppliers. With today’s supply chain risks, volatility in supply, and the increased regulatory situation, the traditional methods to discover and onboard suppliers can’t keep up with the pace of changing information. 

Today’s hero uses the power of TYS’s discovery function to quickly find numerous pre-vetted suppliers to fill an unexpected gap in their supplier base. A simple search function reveals suppliers that meet the requirements and characteristics this organization is looking for along with risk data including questionnaires and third-party data.

The supplier information is available nearly immediately, which reduces the effort to discover qualified suppliers and reduces onboarding cycle time. 

Enjoy the first installment of Tales of TYS Superheroes – stories of everyday heroes in supplier management! 

 

“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. 

Digital Transformers: Supplier Management Using Blockchain

Historically, procurement has considered themselves the ‘gatekeepers’ for enterprise contracts and supplier relationships. Information was regarded as power, especially if it could give them an upper hand in supplier negotiations. That paradigm no longer works.

Today’s procurement organizations are not only beginning to empower distributed buyers to make more and more independent decisions about suppliers, they are working towards stronger, more trust-based partnerships with those suppliers.

In this episode of Digital Transformers, powered by Supply Chain Now, hosts Kevin L. Jackson and Kelly Barner welcome Gary Storr and April Harrison with Trust Your Supplier to the podcast to discuss supplier management using blockchain:

· The importance of establishing mutual trust in a digitally transformed business environment and how specific technologies can help companies achieve that at scale

· How blockchain can not only increase the trust factor of supplier information, it can also prevent suppliers from having to manually make updates across a range of customer systems

· Ways in which the past year has helped procurement see just how reliant they are on their suppliers

Listen to the episode here.

The Value of a Blockchain-Based Identity

by April Harrison

A trusted supplier identity is the keystone of our Trust Your Supplier (TYS) platformTYS provides organizations a trusted exchange of information across an encrypted blockchain environment to minimize risk & fraud throughout the onboarding and life cycle of partnerships. Our value proposition relies on ensuring identity control and privacy for network participants. 

The exchange of information is crucial to business operations in all industries. Conventional systems are open to fraud, error and inefficiency. These manual processes lack data security and each participant has their own separate database, or ledger — increasing the possibility of human error or fraud. Shared databases cannot prevent malicious activity. Hacked entities can corrupt or destroy data in the shared database, making it invalid for everyone involved. 

Blockchain is designed for trust and secure trading, reducing vulnerabilities. It provides clear provenance and a single, shared, tamper-evident ledger. Once recorded, transactions cannot be altered. This is ideal for supporting auditing capabilities as it provides an immutable relationship history between parties. 

The TYS supplier profile data is sovereign, owned & controlled by the supplier, who can selectively share additional profile information with companies they choose to connect with on the network. 

This single, digital identity for suppliers can be shared with multiple buyers and business networks. A 2-tiered supplier profile approach allows suppliers to be discovered by new customers without handing over unlimited access to their data. 

To learn more about this innovative new approach to supplier identity that is transforming supplier relationships, please visit www.TrustYourSupplier.com