What are the 3 ways to prepare Supplier Questionnaires?

In addition to the supplier’s basic business information in your RFP questionnaire, it’s important to address some important deal-breakers that can derail your contract right from the start. Asking the right questions can help you uncover hidden risks that might otherwise go unnoticed. Be sure to include these 3 sections in your questionnaire to keep your agreement on track long after you award a contract.

1. Create Supplier Questions Repository

Most RFPs have a common section of procurement needs, procurement milestones and RFPs are repeated across financial years. Each RFP has a set of sourcing questions and procurement managers can collate those categories and questions for each category. In this one-time activity, domain experts huddle and define procurement scenarios and different organizational needs. Normally, organizations can convert those needs into questions and eventually prepare a question library. Based on the questions’ library, organizations can reuse the question library while preparing for each RFP and add procurement evaluation criteria.

2. Define Questionnaire Templates

Organizations can prepare standardized templates for specific departments or buying categories (IT Hardware, Services, Facilities, etc). The sourcing team can prepare templates for each category and store the template in a centralized repository. Business teams or departments can choose templates based on their needs, fill in data in templates and send them to the sourcing team for inviting suppliers. A streamlined template-based approach helps business teams to customize and convert procurement needs into RFPs with minimum effort.

3. RFIs to Manage Newer Initiative

Some organizations have a mandate to fulfill corporate goals such as sustainability, supplier diversity, or business innovation needs. Most strategic sourcing teams will build questionnaires from scratch and start with identifying and defining the requirements. To tackle such problems, organizations can float an RFI to understand the granular requirements, potential suppliers and most importantly prepare the procurement evaluation criteria. Teams can work together to combine sourcing requirements with evaluation criteria and prepare supplier questionnaires. In this way, the sourcing team can realize what a best-in-class supplier looks like and does the supplier’s obligations match the requirements of the organization.

What's the future of procurement?

Supplier centricity focuses on integrated relationships. Today’s supplier interactions are largely tactical and lack any real insight or platform integration. That’s why the future of procurement is dependent on creating a new operating model to support supplier centricity; one which drives supplier performance and relationships to a new level while fostering innovation and mitigating risk.

This model is one where suppliers will:

• have access to key information to help build robust solutions
• integrate into your environment through supplier-managed storefronts and master data portals
• contribute to the business, product, and category innovation
• receive feedback through sentiment, community feedback, and traditional performance metrics
• self-manage purchasing transactions through payment.