Retention of vendor surveys - Surveys to our company, sent by our vendors

I'm cleaning files and discovered a large file that my predecessor kept of every survey that she filled out and sent back to a vendor. My first thought was that perhaps she did this so that each year she could look back to see what she wrote the previous year...but I cannot find anything in the standard that states I must retain vendor surveys.

In case that wasn't clear, these are surveys to our company, sent by our vendor, that I would fill out and return to that vendor. I see no need to keep a copy here as required by the standard, but am I missing something?

little__cee said:

I'm cleaning files and discovered a large file that my predecessor kept of every survey that she filled out and sent back to a vendor. My first thought was that perhaps she did this so that each year she could look back to see what she wrote the previous year...but I cannot find anything in the standard that states I must retain vendor surveys.

In case that wasn't clear, these are surveys to our company, sent by our vendor, that I would fill out and return to that vendor. I see no need to keep a copy here as required by the standard, but am I missing something?

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No the standard does not require that you mantain the vendor surveys, however, you may want to check your internal procedures and see if there is anything inthem that would require you to maintain them for X amount of time.

I get these and routinely keep them ONLY until I'm certain the faxed copy I sent to them actually got there - then I File 13 them. The standard doesn't require you keep them, our internal procedures don't, and we could think of no real value in retaining them.

In my opinion, these are not "Quality documents" and are strictly under the purview of the business function of the organization.

If they were mine to deal with, I might keep them for one year to compare against previous year response. In no instance would I just "copy" the response from a previous year into the new survey..

If you maintain a supplier file of your own assessment of the supplier, it might be interesting and instructive to compare your responses to the supplier's survey (after each period of experience) with your initial assessment when you approved the supplier.

If I were to compare my response about one supplier with my response about another supplier, I would probably create a matrix of comparative points and keep the matrix updated with each subsequent survey, but not retain the actual surveys.

Wes Bucey said:

I might keep them for one year to compare against previous year response.

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I keep some notes about the sender. Like their e-mail addies and such. Where is that soap box?? Ah, there we are...


It's amazing how some people send out detailed surveys and still forget to properly state where to send the replies! Another thing: I hate having to fill something in by hand and then use fax or snail mail to reply. Use E-mail and electronic documents for crying out loud. Ok, rant over... Back to the proper topic:

little__cee: As long as your procedures say nothing about saving these documents you are free to deep six them. Of course, you may want to keep them for a while if you ask for actions in your reply.

/Claes

There is an entire science to constructing surveys and tests (psychometrics) - the problem is most people who construct surveys have no clue the science exists and thus burden the world with poorly designed surveys and tests which end up being pure "muda" (which sounds a lot like the French "merdé")

They don't make me mad, I just ignore a bad test or survey.