Today’s procurement organizations face a daunting array of challenges when it comes to gathering and managing the supplier information necessary for supporting their overall business objectives. Beyond simply assessing suppliers’ ability to deliver goods and services, it’s also essential to evaluate their financial stability, the potential for supply disruptions, environmental/sustainability initiatives, and their unique compliance and regulatory requirements. 

As a result, effective supplier qualification involves more than auditing. It should also be viewed as an effective risk-assessment tool. When done correctly, supplier qualification can provide a high level of confidence that your suppliers, vendors, and contractors are able to consistently supply quality materials, components, and services in compliance with regulatory requirements. At the same time, an integrated supplier qualification process should also identify — and mitigate — the associated risks of materials, components, and services. 
 

 

Questions are the building blocks of your supplier qualifications tools. As you create a repository of individual questions, they’re stored in the Question Library. You can later use questions in the Question Library to create the Initiatives you use for qualifying your suppliers.    

The questions in your repository are reusable and available to other supplier qualification managers. Additionally, category managers can open and use questions in the Question Library as requirements in sourcing negotiations. By using predefined questions, you can quickly build your initiatives without having to redefine commonly used questions.  

Qualification areas are containers for your questions. You use a Qualification Area and its questions to evaluate a particular aspect of a supplier.  

After adding one or more Qualification Areas to an Initiative, you use the questions in the Qualification Areas to create a questionnaire. You then send the questionnaire to the supplier and any internal responders for a response. Once all the responders have submitted replies, you and any other evaluators review the answers. If all evaluators approve the responses, a qualification for the supplier is created for that Qualification Area.  

Qualification Models are containers for Qualification Areas. You use a Qualification Model and its Qualification Areas to perform a comprehensive evaluation of a supplier, known as an assessment.   

When creating an assessment Initiative, you specify a single Qualification Model containing one or more Qualification Areas. The questions contained in the model’s Qualification Areas are used to create the questionnaire that’s sent to your suppliers and any internal responders. The application creates draft qualifications and assessments when you launch the Initiative.  

Initiative  

An Initiative is the main tool you use to create, manage, and track your qualifications and assessments of suppliers. When you launch your Initiative, its questionnaires are sent to its suppliers and internal responders for their responses. As soon as responders have submitted their responses, users can review the responses and either accept or reject them. You can use those supplier qualification and assessment outcomes in many ways when performing procurement activities.  

Oracle Supplier Qualification Management enables two types of Initiatives: Qualification Initiatives and Assessment Initiatives. Qualification Initiatives are used to evaluate a particular function, capability, or aspect of a supplier. Assessment Initiatives provide a more thorough and comprehensive evaluation of the supplier. Assessment Initiatives evaluate the supplier in both discrete areas and at the supplier level. Overall, the Supplier Qualification Management lifecycle involves the following stages:  

• Create Initiative  

• Respond to Questionnaire  
• Accept Response  
• Evaluate Response  
• Manage and Requalify 

By working with Inspirage to implement Oracle’s Supplier Qualification Management system, procurement organizations of all shapes and sizes can now leverage a single tool to address their most important business priorities. That list includes complying with corporate policies, improving visibility to key supplier characteristics and capabilities, reducing the risk of supplier-related disruptions, and improving sourcing decisions by considering relevant supplier factors.