Initiatives

An initiative is the main tool you use to create, manage, and track your qualifications and assessments of your suppliers. When you launch your initiative, its questionnaires are sent to its suppliers and internal responders for their responses.

As soon as responders have submitted their responses, you can review the responses and either accept or reject them. You can use the supplier's qualification and assessment outcome in many ways when performing procurement activities.

You can have two kinds of initiatives - qualification initiatives and assessment initiatives. Qualification initiatives are used to evaluate a particular function, capability or aspect of a supplier. For example, you might want to view all certifications a supplier has. Or you might want to examine the quality control procedures or environmental protection history for a supplier. Once you create a qualification initiative, a qualification for that particular aspect of the supplier is created.

Assessment initiatives provide a more thorough and comprehensive evaluation of the supplier. Assessment initiatives evaluate the supplier in both discrete areas, but also at the supplier level. After you launch the initiative, you create one or more qualifications for particular aspects of the supplier (as mentioned). You also create an overall, general assessment for the supplier.

You build your Initiative using setup objects that are already predefined in the application:

Questions
Qualification areas
Qualification models (assessment initiatives only)

You can duplicate qualification or assessment initiatives from the Manage Initiatives page, Monitor Initiative page, or View Initiative page. Initiatives of all statuses can be duplicated. When you duplicate a qualification initiative, qualification areas, suppliers, and evaluation team are copied. When you duplicate an assessment initiative, qualification model and its qualification areas, (in addition to suppliers, and evaluation team) are copied.

Questions

Questions are the fundamental building blocks for your supplier qualifications process. You create a repository of questions from which you can draw to create qualification areas. Then you use the qualification areas to build the initiatives you use for qualifying your suppliers. The questions in your repository are reusable and available to other supplier qualification managers. By using predefined questions, you can quickly build your initiatives without having to redefine commonly used questions. Questions can apply at the supplier level or at the supplier site level.

Qualification Areas

Qualification areas are containers for your questions. When you create a qualification area, you specify the questions it includes. You use a qualification area and its questions to evaluate a particular aspect of a supplier. When you create a qualification area, you specify which questions it contains. You also specify the possible outcomes that can result from a supplier's response to those questions. You add one or more qualification areas at the latest revision to create a qualification initiative. Then you send the initiative's questionnaire to the supplier (any internal responders receive a different internal questionnaire) for a response. Once the responders for a specific supplier or site have submitted replies, and you accept them, you and other evaluators can view the answers.

Qualification Models

Qualification models are containers for qualification areas. When you create a qualification model, you specify the qualification areas it includes. You use a qualification model and its qualification areas to perform a comprehensive evaluation of a supplier called an assessment. You create an assessment initiative by identifying the qualification model to be used. Once responders begin submitting replies, you can view and accept them. Once you have accepted the responses, you and any other reviewers can evaluate the answers.

Questionnaires

A questionnaire is a vehicle used for collecting data from the supplier and any internal responders. You can modify your questionnaire by removing any nonrequired questions. You can also change the order of the questions, or move them between sections. The supplier version contains the questions for the supplier responders. Internal versions that contain questions for internal responders (if any).

You can include attachments in a questionnaire and share it with suppliers or internal responders. Who will receive these attachments depends on the responder type you have selected. These attachments are shared at the questionnaire level and usually include general information like company policy, guidelines, terms and conditions, and so on.

Create Initiatives

Your first task when creating an initiative is to plan the structure of the initiative. For a qualification initiative, you should identify the qualification areas that you include. For an assessment initiative, you identify the appropriate qualification model.

On the Create Initiative dialog box, choose whether you're creating a qualification or an assessment initiative. Specify the title for your initiative. Also choose the procurement BU that owns the initiative. Once you choose a procurement BU, you can only see qualification areas and models that are owned by this procurement BU. You can also see any global models and areas.

On the Edit Initiative page, you identify the qualification model and qualification areas, the evaluators of the initiative, and the date by which the evaluation must be completed. You also specify the responders (both supplier and internal) you're targeting for the initiative. Also, you can assign an owner for the initiative (by default, you're the owner).

For an assessment initiative, you choose the qualification model, set a date by which the evaluation must be completed, and an owner for the assessment.

For a qualification initiative, you choose the qualification areas to be included. For each area, you specify an owner of the resulting qualification and an evaluation due date. If the qualification area contains branching questions, you can view the branches by using the icon in the Questions column.

In the Suppliers section, you can use the add icon or Search and Add, to choose the suppliers you want to evaluate using this initiative. Here are the volume limits for the initiative:

Maximum number of suppliers you can add to an initiative: 400
Maximum number of internal responders you can add for each supplier in survey initiatives: 25
Maximum number of qualifications an initiative can generate: 2000

Note: The number of qualifications equals the number of suppliers times the number of qualification areas. You can split the suppliers and create a new initiative when you need to create more than 2000 qualifications.

If you want the initiative to apply to a particular supplier site, you can specify the site. Finally, you specify a contact at the supplier or supplier site to receive notifications. If you specified a supplier site, you only see contacts for that site. If you included internal questions in the initiative, you must define an internal responder.

On the questionnaire step of the initiative you can define translations for the questionnaire title, introduction text, section names, and instructions for each section.

When initiatives are automatically created based on events such as supplier registration or requalification, the introduction text of the questionnaire is derived from the rule set. You can define translations for the introduction text within the rule set, so that the questionnaire content is displayed in the responder’s preferred language.

To create a qualification initiative:

Create and specify the initiative level attributes.
Identify and add the necessary qualification areas.
Identify and add the suppliers.
Configure the recipients of the questionnaires.
Modify the questionnaire if necessary.
Launch the initiative.

To create an assessment initiative:

Create and specify the initiative level attributes.
Identify and add the appropriate qualification model.
Add the suppliers.
Configure the recipients of the questionnaires.
Specify whether you reuse active qualifications.
Modify the questionnaire if necessary.
Launch the initiative.

How You Configure Initiatives

On the Configuration page, you specify the recipients of the questionnaires. If you have all required questions previously answered, the previous answers are carried over and the application doesn't send the questionnaire. You can optionally send questionnaires that have optional questions.

On the configuration page, you can also change the owner or evaluation due dates for specific qualifications or assessments from the ones specified in the Overview page. If the Qualification Owner and Evaluation Due Date fields aren't visible, you can display them by choosing the Show All option from Columns option of the View menu.

For assessment initiatives, you have the option to reuse all reusable qualifications. Only active qualifications for the same Procurement BU and that are in the same revision as the one specified in the initiative can be reused.

How You Modify Questionnaires

In the Questionnaire page, you can modify the questionnaire that was built using the questions in the qualification areas defined for the initiative. The questionnaire consists of one or more sections where initially each section corresponds to a qualification area.

On the Questionnaires page, you can

Change section titles and enter instructions to the responders.
Move question sections.
Move questions within a section and move questions between sections.
Add a new section and move existing questions to it.
Delete a question (if the question isn't required)
Specify the response due date. Note that if there are both supplier and internal questionnaires, each can have a different due date.
If the initiative contains any qualification areas that have automatic evaluation enabled, you can choose to have responses to this questionnaire automatically accepted. The application can use the scoring information and the supplier response to automatically determine the outcome for the qualification.