Create a Qualification Area

You use qualification areas to contain and organize your qualification questions.

Once you have your questions added to your qualification area, you can then use your qualification areas in qualification models for use with assessment initiatives, or you can add one or more qualification areas directly to qualification initiatives.

Newton Consulting is branching into a new area of services. Clare Furey, the supplier qualification manager, is creating a new qualification area to use with future initiatives to qualify prospective suppliers.

Create a Qualification Area

1. Clare navigates to the Create Qualification Area: Overview page.

2. She enters Financial Viability as the qualification area name.

3. She accepts the default, Vision Operations, as the Procurement BU which owns this qualification area, and notes that she is assigned as the qualification manager who owns the area.

4. She enters a description of area containing questions relating to various financial details.

5. If she wants to assign herself as the default qualification owner for this qualification area, then she selects the Default qualification owner check box.

   When this qualification area is included in a qualification initiative, she will be defaulted as the qualification owner.

6. Since she later selects which Procurement BUs can use this area, she leaves the Global box unchecked.

7. Since Clare did not check the Global check box, she must specify which procurement BUs can use this qualification area, so she clicks select and add icon in the Business Access table. When the Procurement BU dialog box displays, she searches and selects the names of the BUs that can use this area for qualifying suppliers. When she is finished listing the BUs, she clicks OK.

8. She can assign a default qualification owner to manage the evaluation.

9. Since Clare wants to reuse this qualification area every year to keep her supplier information current, she chooses to not reuse responses. This way suppliers will need to complete the initiative questionnaire every year with new, updated response values.

10. The questions in this qualification area solicit general information about the suppliers' financial organization and history. None of the questions are required, and many are open-ended, so there is no need for her to view the responses and possibly reject any of them. Since she does not need to view the responses, she enables the Automatically accept responses attribute.

11. In this qualification area, Clare uses several questions that allow scoring. If a question is scored, evaluators can assign a numeric value to the supplier response value. These response scores help you and other evaluators to compare and grade responses between different suppliers. To use the questions that can be scored in this qualification area, Clare selects the check box named Enable scoring.

12. If she wants to automatically create an initiative with a single qualification, then she selects the Automatic initiative with single qualification check box.

13. She sets the default expiration reminder value to 30 days. Therefore, for any qualification created using this area, (unless the qualification owner changes the value), expiration reminders start going out 30 days before the qualification expires.

14. If she wants to automatically requalify qualifications on expiration, then she can select the Automatic Requalification on expiration check box.

15. If she wants to automatically requalify qualifications whenever there is a new response, then she can select the Automatic Requalification on new response check box.

16. Now Clare must add her questions, so she clicks the Add icon in the Questions region. When the Search and Add dialog box appears, she finds and adds a question called Annual Revenue. This question has been defined earlier and is typically used by all her basic supplier qualification initiatives.

17. When she has selected the question, she clicks Apply to add it to the area, and then clicks OK to close the dialog box. The attributes for the question such as revision number, responder type, and whether a response is required appear in the question table, once the question is added.

18. Clare continues adding questions. She could create a new question at this point by clicking Create and Add , but all the questions she needs for this area have already been defined.

19. She defines three possible outcomes that can result from qualifications performed using the area: Good, Satisfactory, and Unsatisfactory.

20. Once Clare is finished creating her new qualification area, she clicks Save and then Activate.