I'm doing a 22 pager right now.
Just check off all the "yes", "no" or "N/A" responses will take the better part of this morning.
Then I have to rate everything on a scale from 0-3.
Then they want procedure numbers for all the "yes" answers.

So I think I'll procrastinate here on the cove a bit longer.

In relation to this topic, what right does a customer have to expect me to answer things like our top three customers and total sales?

I'm doing a 22 pager right now.
Just check off all the "yes", "no" or "N/A" responses will take the better part of this morning.
Then I have to rate everything on a scale from 0-3.
Then they want procedure numbers for all the "yes" answers.

So I think I'll procrastinate here on the cove a bit longer.

In relation to this topic, what right does a customer have to expect me to answer things like our top three customers and total sales?

Read the last question first! If it says "Are you ISO 9001 registered? If yes, you do not need to answer any of the previous questions" you're saved! ;)

I'm doing a 22 pager right now.
Just check off all the "yes", "no" or "N/A" responses will take the better part of this morning.
Then I have to rate everything on a scale from 0-3.
Then they want procedure numbers for all the "yes" answers.

So I think I'll procrastinate here on the cove a bit longer.

In relation to this topic, what right does a customer have to expect me to answer things like our top three customers and total sales?

I recall having a 28-pager in front of me ten or twelve years ago. It was during a time when practically every company on earth was trying to get ISO-registered, and I had piles of the d@mned things (I was QM in a machining job shop at the time.) It was that one that made me decide to compile a list of answers to the most frequent-appearing items and supply it as a response to questionnaires. There was some protest; some customers insisted on having their questionnaire completed despite the fact that all of their questions were answered in my canned response. We dealt with those on a case-by-case basis, but having the canned responses eliminated 95% of the time devoted to completing questionnaires.

Insofar as divulging information that you'd rather not divulge, just say so. Most who ask those questions are just fishing and won't be put off by your being reluctant to answer.

Read the last question first! If it says "Are you ISO 9001 registered? If yes, you do not need to answer any of the previous questions" you're saved! ;)

I wish.

That's how I do my suppplier surveys... "If you are ISO registered STOP HERE and attach a copy of your certificate".

unfortunately
1) this one doesn't do that, and
2) we're not ISO registered yet.

I just fail to see the point of doing this whole thing AND THEN having the customer come for an audit.

What a waste of space most of these questionnaires are! I can't count the number of times I been auditing the purchasing department and asked them how they assess their suppliers. "We send out a supplier questionnaire" they say proudly" - "so what do you do with them" I ask. "Oh, we file them over here". They don't do anything with them!:mad:

I wish.

That's how I do my suppplier surveys... "If you are ISO registered STOP HERE and attach a copy of your certificate".

unfortunately
1) this one doesn't do that, and
2) we're not ISO registered yet.

I just fail to see the point of doing this whole thing AND THEN having the customer come for an audit.

Can't you just send them a copy of your cert and/or manual and say "Any other questions?" Better yet, add on "Any other questions can be answered when you come in and visit. You can answer your own survey questions at that time."

I think I sprinkled too much cynacism on my wheaties this morning.

I had one that was in an excel format with 12 tabs. We printed the whole package on 11 x 17 and had close to 50 pages. VERY silly!!!

There is some value from asking for your top 3 and the total sales. For example, you have an automotive customer looking at your facility and see that you are doing automotive work, your learning curve is much lower. As for the sales volumes - a new customer might get nervous if one customer accounts for 80% of your sales. If your not confortable providing this information - just add a note that this could be provided at a later date.

I think 12 pages is as long as I've had to fill out. What is interesting was that this one with a few others asks the "Are you ISO registered?' question and even if you are, you still have to fill out the full survey (which of course has all ISO cert extracted questions!) :confused:

Go figure! I get tired of filling them out even if they’re the short version when all you do is submit the ISO cert. I'm sure as has been mentioned, that what the completed surveys are even used for is dubious at best.

Larry

60 pages - for a supplier to Honda - we tried using our standard response - no deal, .... fortunately I had help on that one.

And to make matters worse, in my experience, a significant percentage of these surveys are never scrutinized carefully enough. I have had the chance to audit many organizations that require some type of supplier self surveys. Intentionally and randomly, I delved into some of the survey records. Many times, the answers being provided by the suppliers were blatantly wrong, some other times, many "critical" questions were not answered or should have been acted upon, such as the time when a small machine shop producing some tight-tolerance components stated that they had no form of calibration system in place.

Many organizations requiring this type of surveys do not even have a requirement defining who is responsible for reviewing the answers and deciding if follow up questions are necessary. The impression is that they go through the motions, but the process is totally ineffective. There are other threads that deal with supplier self surveys and how dysfunctional they are. But it would be extra painful to fill out these extremely long surveys suspecting that they will not be carefully evaluated.

I recall having a 28-pager in front of me ...It was that one that made me decide to compile a list of answers to the most frequent-appearing items and supply it as a response to questionnaires. There was some protest; some customers insisted on having their questionnaire completed despite the fact that all of their questions were answered in my canned response. We dealt with those on a case-by-case basis, but having the canned responses eliminated 95% of the time devoted to completing questionnaires.

Insofar as divulging information that you'd rather not divulge, just say so. Most who ask those questions are just fishing and won't be put off by your being reluctant to answer.

YES! that is what I did too and it worked...not the ideal solution but it significantly reduced the non value add time. THEN I turned around and eliminated our supplier surveys!

Seven pages...

In relation to this topic, what right does a customer have to expect me to answer things like our top three customers and total sales?They can ask, but I reserve the right not to answer. I will not answer such questions. In fact, I'm not even allowed to reveal information about other customers.

And to make matters worse, in my experience, a significant percentage of these surveys are never scrutinized carefully enough.Or even scrutinized at all. They just sit in various filing cabinets, slowly turning to dust...

As for the question in the thread title, I think Mustang may be the holder of the all time record. See this old thread: Customer just sent me a 118 page Supplier Self Survey! (http://elsmar.com/Forums/showthread.php?t=8424) (We all agreed that that was just plain silly).

I also suggest a look in Supplier Evaluation and Approval forms - Discussion and Evaluation Examples (http://elsmar.com/Forums/showthread.php?t=5148&highlight=questionnaire) There are many more of them scattered across the Cove.

/Claes

twenty some pages. what rubbish!:mad:

I don't really name names....I might give them a breakdown in percentages as to what industries we supply to, they can always contact us for more info (like they really use this stuff! lol) As for the money part, it is pretty much public info so I put whatever my cfo wants.

This is one of those things that I've wondered what would happen if I answered in gibberish....but alas, the customer is always right.

I have called customers whom I have felt sent surveys that were way to long and asked them why they felt they needed this much information (in a nice way, of course).

I think the worst part is the scoring.
I hate scored quality audits.

Hate them.

I think the worst part is the scoring.
I hate scored quality audits.

Hate them.
Not me, we always get all the points when I score us, and I can cite documentation/processes to prove it!:biglaugh:

Not me, we always get all the points when I score us, and I can cite documentation/processes to prove it!:biglaugh:

well... yeah. Me too.

But in principal I HATE them. ;)

I know it would never fly, but I would be tempted to send a note back with the survey saying...

We are happy to send you the information on this survey. We know that you will diligently analyze the responses. When you will send us the results of your analysis, we will use them to improve our interaction with your company.

In order to keep from over-burdening your analysts, we will help you by not returning any additional surveys until you have had time to analyze and report to us the results of this survey.


:lol: :lol: :lol:

My primary experience with supplier surveys requested by customers was with automotive and aerospace customers.

My company was self-declared compliant to an ISO or QS Standard, so we were not able to slide by ticking off our registration number and registrar. In defense, I did as Jim Wynne did and created a super slick self assessment survey based on the QS9000 Standard.

Each page was divided into 3 columns. Column 1 was the text of the Standard; column 2 had a detailed explanation of how we met the Standard; column 3 was blank. We invited ALL customers and prospects to drop by anytime (we were open 24/7), armed with the copy of the survey and invited them to compare any or all of the clauses with our actual operation for themselves and fill n the blanks with their own observations.

The darn thing worked very well - never had a single prospect or customer take us up on the challenge. After the first five uses of the Self Assessment Survey (SAS) in response to requests, we got such complimentary comments, we decided to have the thing printed up and bound to use as a sales tool. Once we started using it in advance, we never received another request for a SAS from any customer or prospect.

The problem of customers asking for confidential financial or sales information can be a very touchy subject. We were not a publicly traded corporation and considered information about our customers as trade secret (both our own secret and the secrets of our customers.) Our solution was to "inoculate" customers and prospects to prevent them asking the question. I no longer remember the exact language, but the gist of it was,
"We are a privately held corporation and do not disclose our financial information to any entity which has not signed a confidentiality agreement binding all principals, partners, employees, servants, and agents. We recognize some customers ask such questions out of concern whether the supplier has sufficient financial capacity to service projected orders. If your annual order will exceed one million dollars, we will supply a performance bond guaranteeing our performance if you will provide a similar bond guaranteeing your performance in purchasing.

"Some customers ask about who and how much business we do with other companies. We consider such information a trade secret and do not disclose such data. Please do not ask."

This "immunization shot" was part of the cover letter accompanying the SAS we sent.

"Some customers ask about who and how much business we do with other companies. We consider such information a trade secret and do not disclose such data. Please do not ask."Good one, Wes.

In fact, we have a written procedure about how to handle business secrets. In short it states: "Information about a customer concerns only the customer and ourselves". It came up in this discussion about ISO 9001:2000, Clause 7.5.4 : Defining Customer Property - Specifications, templates, patterns from customers (http://elsmar.com/Forums/showthread.php?t=6549)

/Claes

I'd like to bring this thread back to the front of the line for a bit. I handle most client surveys sent to us, which has become substantial as compared to previous years. I'm going to openly admit that I think this process of sending pages of questions with yes/no/na answers is unproductive, does not add any value, and completely misses the target goal of properly assessing a supplier.

I understand that companies must have a system in place to evaluate their suppliers, however, shouldn't this be a combination of evaluating performance, i.e. on time delivery, conformance of products supplied, etc... and ensuring their quality system is on par with requirements.

As suggested in this thread, these surveys are simply a request for information so that a company can assure themselves that their supplier has all applicable quality requirements in place and therefore a "canned" response seems much more reasonable than individually reviewing a multitude of surveys asking similar questions in different ways.

Not only this, but many of the surveys we recieve aren't even applicable to our trade, we are a service company performing destructive materials testing, a majority of the surveys we recieve are targeted at manufacturers, or even maintenance stations (FAA reqs).

In my opinion, the process of requiring companies to send a survey to their suppliers is backwards. The appropriate process should be to require your suppliers provide a detailed summary of their quality system which displays their compliance to required quality standards. A canned response from our company (as a service provider) would be much more detailed and relevant than many of these "canned" surveys we recieve.

On another note, I'm curious what others think...are surveys with open ended questions more likely to be useful than checklists with yes/no/na answers? We recieve both types, typically I prefer the checklist because it can be completed quicker, the open ended questions however (such as "describe how your company handles change control") are much more likely to provide our customer with a better understanding of our quality systems.

That's my :2cents: what do others think?

Speaking from a FAA Repair Station;

We must have our vendor survey and I have found that we have a much better response to the survey if it is of the Yes/No/NA variety. However,I do prefer receiving the canned response from my vendors for exactly the reasons you bring up.

That being said, I have a tendency to look at how many nonconforming parts I receive from a vendor to truly judge how well their quality system works. If I start to receive too many then I will ask more probative questions about any systemic issues they may have.

Most of the surveys I get are from existing, satisfied customers who claim to be doing the survey to meet obscure ISO 9001 requirements rather than to evaluate our ability of which they are inevitably already aware.

My favourite questionnaire was a 20 pager from a potential customer which was entirely in German and had to be completed in that language.
French, Polish, Turkish and Gibberish I can cope with but that had me struggling. My employer was too mean to pay for a professional interpretation so I spent several interesting days trying to figure it out and put together a reply. Many of the questions related to the education of our workforce (how many shop floor workers have a university degree was easy to answer) and age of machinery (varies from brand new to 59 years) but most just left me baffled.
I'm still not sure if I answered the questions correctly or accidentally ordered some sauerkraut.
We didn't get the business.

I'm working on a 15 pager as we speak.
It's from an Aerospace provider, they're AS9100 certified but we are not.
The old ISO cert won't work with them.
As far as discussing customers my standard reply is "proprietary information". Although I really like Wes's answer. :applause:

I know it would never fly, but I would be tempted to send a note back with the survey saying...

We are happy to send you the information on this survey. We know that you will diligently analyze the responses. When you will send us the results of your analysis, we will use them to improve our interaction with your company.

In order to keep from over-burdening your analysts, we will help you by not returning any additional surveys until you have had time to analyze and report to us the results of this survey.


:lol: :lol: :lol:


On the other side of this, when I was diligently analyzing and updating our supplier information last week, one supplier had a canned response which offerred to allow the customer to audit them for $50.00/hr and a copy of the quality manual was available for $20.00. This was accompanied by a refusal to accept or complete any surveys.

Now that's streamlining a process!

BTW - our survey is 4 pages, so I don't even come close to winning this contest.

As an ISO-17025, I get these things at least once per week. Besides the "if you're already registered, send your cert" section, they still want all the address/phone/fax etc. stuff filled out.

About 2 years ago I made a 1 page cover letter for our scope and cert. I put the name, address, asstd people, what we do, avg sales, etc... on it in big print.

Then I put a section near the bottom saying this was a letter to answer the various supplier and vendor survey forms, and contains all the information needed, plus saving on filling in many small hard-to-read fax surveys and blank spaces.

No complaints yet.

On the other side of this, when I was diligently analyzing and updating our supplier information last week, one supplier had a canned response which offerred to allow the customer to audit them for $50.00/hr and a copy of the quality manual was available for $20.00. This was accompanied by a refusal to accept or complete any surveys.I am curious to know how you handled that situation. The supplier basically offered canned information as you said, and if you want to know more, you will get charged. So, what did you do, if anything? Or were you happy with the canned response?

I am curious to know how you handled that situation. The supplier basically offered canned information as you said, and if you want to know more, you will get charged. So, what did you do, if anything? Or were you happy with the canned response?

I reviewed their canned response, which had most of the information I needed and talked to the people internally (engineering, manufacturing) and externally (sales rep) that would answer my questions.

Our requirements are based on the criticality of the item and the supplier. Less critical parts or vendors do not necessarily need to complete the survey, it is only "recommended" per the matrix I have for qualification requirements. So my hands aren't tied by the procedure. These parts aren't very critical at all and we have few problems with their shipments.

It was fine, but seemed rude to me. I snippily did not reply to the email it was attached to, which bothered no one I'm sure because they hadn't included anything besides a reference to the attachment.

Gah!

I just finished a 14 pager where I was supposed to rate myself on a scale of 0 to 5.
0 being no process and 5 being "world class".
I called the guy in charge of it and discussed how the checklist is geared towards and external auditor doing an actual audit and assigning a score. I, on the other hand, am not doing an audit but filling out a checklist at my desk. I can easily check "yes/no" but assigning a score is not for me to do. I don't know the full scope of their criteria.
His response "use your best judgement based on other QMS's you've seen."

Oh! and apparently their definition of "world class" is that there is none better. #1 best system in the world. There can be only one.
THEN WHY GIVE ME THE OPTION!!!! :frust:

So I just marked everything as "4" or "N/A".

I would have gone with 5 all the way through, how would he determine if it weren't world class A#1. In the end comments you could put "we're just that damned good!"

Honestly, most of these surveys are just paper to satisfy a requirement, they get filled out, filed, and that's the end of it.

I would have gone with 5 all the way through, how would he determine if it weren't world class A#1. In the end comments you could put "we're just that damned good!"

Honestly, most of these surveys are just paper to satisfy a requirement, they get filled out, filed, and that's the end of it.


the thing with claiming all 5 is I'm sure that would trigger an actual audit.

And I know you're right about satisfying a requirement...
I can't wait until the end of August when I'll just be able to attach and ISO9001 certificate and be done with most of these is 5 minutes.
That is a definate benefit to ISO....for me anyway.

I would have gone with 5 all the way through, how would he determine if it weren't world class A#1. In the end comments you could put "we're just that damned good!"

Honestly, most of these surveys are just paper to satisfy a requirement, they get filled out, filed, and that's the end of it.Yep! Only time anyone refers to it afterward is if there is a foulup. Then, they use it as "proof" you lied about your capability!

I wonder what would happen if you returned one which had "N/A" (not applicable or not answerable) scrawled across every page. Would it similarly be "filed and forgotten?";)

the thing with claiming all 5 is I'm sure that would trigger an actual audit.

And I know you're right about satisfying a requirement...
I can't wait until the end of August when I'll just be able to attach and ISO9001 certificate and be done with most of these is 5 minutes.
That is a definate benefit to ISO....for me anyway.

At my company, all that would of triggered is a couple of giggles and a 'cocky SOB' definitely not an audit unless we only received non-conforming products from you.

I wonder what would happen if you returned one which had "N/A" (not applicable or not answerable) scrawled across every page. Would it similarly be "filed and forgotten?"

As for that one, it would automatically trigger something, at the very least a phone call (if the vendor is in some Siberian waste) or a vacation.....er audit if you are in some tropical paradise. :D

I got so sick and tired of filling those things out I made up a form letter that stated we were ISO certified ..here is a copy of our certificate and have a nice day.

I got so sick and tired of filling those things out I made up a form letter that stated we were ISO certified ..here is a copy of our certificate and have a nice day.

yup! I did the same thing. I did add a form that had our companies vital stats (org chart, capacity, building sizes, headcount breakdowns, core competancies, etc.) that answered most of the other (reasonable) non-ISO specific questions. surprisingly, I only one supplier manager call em on it and I talked him into accepting the form with the logic that I could either spend my time answering each unique survey I get OR I could spend it making the quality cost and delivery or our product better. (I did tell how many of the silly things we got each year...) I though I was going to have to explain hwo his questions and my answers to them were non-value add but fortunately I didn't have to go there...