This blog describes the benefits of using Modular Questionnaires in Ariba Supplier Management, using the example of a certificate questionnaire and highlights some recent improvements.
Modular Questionnaires are used to collect information from suppliers, that does not fit into other supplier lifecycle processes. Each questionnaire can have its own approval process and expiration date, it can also allow for updates by recipients, making it a powerful tool in supplier interaction.
Questionnaires can be managed from the questionnaire page in supplier management, here you can track the status, approval and scoring of questionnaires or request the supplier to submit an update. You can directly interact with suppliers with questionnaires, independent of their status in other supplier lifecycle processes.
An interesting implementation of Modular Questionnaires is to use it to collect certificate data from your suppliers. It is considered best practice to use a separate questionnaire for this and not include in other supplier lifecycle processes. Ariba has a special answer type for certificate questions which collects information on the validity date, issuer other details of the specific certificate. This ensures consistent reporting and also enables filtering on certificate details in the Supplier Management environment.
Your supplier can provide information on their certificates via the SAP Business Network, with any account type. Once a certificate question has been answered, the certificates section is added to the supplier profile and the suppliers certificates can be reviewed here.
Supplier can be invited to complete your questionnaire from the supplier 360 view, if you would like to invite one supplier or select multiple from the dashboard. With the SAP Procurement 2311 release a new feature makes the modular questionnaire a more powerful tool, as it is now possible to send a questionnaire to up to 10.000 suppliers at once. Like wave planning for registrations, waves can be prepared in SM Admin:
Modular questionnaires can offer your organization a useful tool to expand on the default supplier management processes and gather more information from your supplier on varying topics, in a transparent and compliant manner.
If you would like to know more about how we make procurement simple using modular questionnaire, please get in touch.