Internal Surveys on Suppliers

Create survey qualifications to aggregate feedback on suppliers from multiple internal responders and use these to build consensus on supplier performance, risk, or other criteria to improve the value of your supplier relationships.

When you're monitoring supplier performance, you may want to supplement quantitative metrics with qualitative feedback from your supplier stakeholders such as:

How easy is the supplier to work with?
How responsive is the call center?
How would you rate the overall professionalism?
How did the supplier perform on the project?

You can model questions like these in the Supplier Qualification work area. You can send questionnaires to multiple responders with knowledge of the supplier and score their responses to get consensus on how the supplier performed and how the supplier is perceived in your organization.

The qualification outcomes of these internal surveys can help you to manage risk, inform sourcing decisions, and improve the value of your supplier relationships.

You start the survey qualification process by creating a survey initiative and adding one or more internal responders for each supplier. When the initiative is launched, a questionnaire is sent to each of the responders, even if responses for the questions already exist from previous surveys.

While the initiative is underway you can track its progress, send a response reminder, reassign the questionnaire to a different responder, respond to the questionnaire on behalf of a responder, and cancel qualifications for a supplier. The received questionnaire responses are automatically accepted.

If you've received enough responses, you can close the questionnaire for responding and proceed to evaluate the qualifications with the responses you already received. You can do so for a single supplier or for all suppliers in the initiative.

Survey qualifications created from the initiative will only include responses collected from the current initiative. To evaluate the qualification, you can view the question's aggregate response, which is a summary of the survey responses for the question, as well as the individual responses. For questions with automatic scoring, the aggregate response score is the average of the scores of the individual responses. Survey qualifications with scoring enabled calculates the qualification score from the questions' aggregate response scores.

Survey qualifications can only use questions and qualification areas designated for the internal survey. Consider these when you're doing the internal surveys:

On an initiative, you can default a list of internal responders for new suppliers by clicking Manage Default Internal Responders.
Even if only one responder is identified for a survey qualification, it's still conducted as a survey of one.
Only a draft internal question can be changed from a survey question to a non-survey question or vice versa.
For survey questions, automatic scoring is enabled by default.
Regarding branching questions, survey questions can have only survey branching questions. The branching questions are limited to five levels.
Optionally default prior survey responses for the same responder.
Cancel outstanding questionnaires.
Filter critical questions when reviewing survey qualification details.
View detail survey responses for a single question.
Choose which response attributes to display for evaluation.
Manually score responses.
Automatically requalify survey qualifications on expiration.
Duplicate survey initiatives.
Configure who can close questionnaires or reassign responders.

Optionally Default Prior Survey Responses for the Same Responder

On the initiative, you can enable defaulting the prior response onto the new survey questionnaire for the same responder. When defaulting responses is enabled, the responder can review the prior responses in the questionnaire and make changes only when necessary. This will save time for the responder to provide information on a survey questionnaire. You can configure the qualification area to automatically populate responses. Then on the initiative, if all the qualification areas have defaulting response enabled, it will be enabled on the initiative as well by default.

Cancel Outstanding Questionnaires

You can cancel an outstanding questionnaire that you no longer need a response for or if it was sent out by mistake.

Filter Critical Questions When Reviewing Survey Qualification Details

During the evaluation of a survey qualification, you can filter and view root level critical questions and their responses helping you to make better and faster qualification decisions. When a user clicks on the View Critical Questions button, they see only the critical root questions and their responses. If a child question is critical, the root level question is shown with a critical icon.

If the critical question icon is displayed for a root level question, the root level question or its child level question is critical.

View Detail Survey Responses for a Single Question

On the Evaluate Qualification page, you can focus on the response details of a single question by clicking the Details icon. You can then review the aggregate as well as individual responses to the question on the Response Details page.

Choose Which Response Attributes to Display for Evaluation

On the Response Details page, you can choose which attributes to display for evaluation by adding or removing response attributes.

Manually Score Responses

For Questions with manual scoring, you can now manually score the questions after reviewing individual responses and the question's aggregate response. You can add scores with two decimals of precision for each question response.