Respond to a Questionnaire

The buying company with which you want to enter into procurement transactions may ask to perform some assessments or qualifications on your company first.

If you're an existing supplier for the buying company, the buyer may also ask you to respond to regularly occurring reviews. As an example, an annual review of your certifications. If so, you receive a notification in your worklist area that a questionnaire exists to which you should respond. Once you answer the questions and attach any documentation requested, you can submit your answer to the buying company. If the supplier qualification manager at the buying company accepts your answers, your response is saved in the buying company's procurement application.

To respond to a qualification questionnaire:

1. View the questionnaire notification in your worklist. You can also navigate to the Manage Questionnaires page. This page lists any questionnaires awaiting a response.

2. View the questionnaire. If this questionnaire has existing responses for any of the questions, the existing response values are shown in the questionnaire.

3. Enter responses to the questionnaire. Some questions are required and some can be optional. You respond by entering values directly into the question or selecting values from the questionnaire menus.

   • Note that there may be multiple sections to the questionnaire. If there are, you can use the Section dialog menu to move between sections. Any responses you enter for a section are saved when you move to a new section.

   • The indicator bar on the question sections displays the number of root (not branching) questions of the questionnaire you have completed. The bar is updated whenever you save your response. If there are any questions with existing responses, the existing values are displayed, and the questions are considered answered when the progress indicator shows completion.

   • Also notice that you may be required to attach documents to your response.

   • You can save your response as a draft and update it later before finally submitting it for review with the buying company. Drafts are helpful if multiple people must collaborate on the response.

   • If you're updating an existing response, you can quickly return to the initial response values by clicking Reset Response. You might want to reset your response values if new information becomes available while you're responding. .

4. When your response is complete, you submit it to the buying company for review and evaluation, and a notification is sent to the initiative owner.

Respond to Questions Using Products and Services or Business Qualifications

When your company registered with the buying company, the registration process collected information about your company and stored it in a supplier profile. Part of this information includes a breakdown of the products and services your company provides. Also appearing may be several types of business classification information such as small business certifications. The supplier qualification manager may have included questions on the questionnaire that use this information.

If a question uses your supplier products and services values, the question shows a hierarchical display of the products and services your company provides. You can use this information to answer subsequent questions on your company's products and services.

If a question uses business classifications, a bulleted list shows all the agencies from which the buyer company has supplier certifications. there's a link shows any existing agencies from which a supplier may have obtained certificates. You can either click the link, or an icon next to it, to update existing certifications or add new ones. You must make sure to update your certifications from agencies included in a bulleted list.

Resubmit Responses

Once you submit your response, the qualification manager reviews your response. If there's a question about your response, the qualification manager contacts you. When you view the questionnaire again, you can see the details for the rejection and then update your response and resubmit it.

Surrogate Responses

If you're not able to submit a response to an initiative, you can request that the category manager submit a surrogate response for you. You do this by contacting the category manager at the buying company, for example, by phone or fax. You provide all the response information, and the category manager enters it for you. The category manager is your point of contact during the life of the initiative. The category manager contacts you for additional information if necessary (for example if your response must be modified and resubmitted.