Looking for feedback on a new Supplier Questionnaire

Hello,

I am looking for feedback on a supplier questionnaire I’ve just drafted up. In particular, I have some uncertainty about section 4.1. I don’t intend to come across as if my company views all of these supporting documents as necessary, but that we would appreciate them on file if available. I’ve formulated the current list of documents based on what we’ve been asked for in questionnaires that we’ve received.

For some context, I am the entirety of the quality dept. of a small business in Canada that operates in primarily probiotic+prebiotic products sold business to business to animal food and supplement companies. We are not currently GFSI certified, but I am working on improving our supplier and raw material risk assessment and approval processes, which has lead me to developing this supplier questionnaire.

I’m trying to hit a balance between being useful and giving use information that actually impacts our supplier risk assessment, while not being a 20+ page questionnaire that is a pain to fill out. That, and some posts I’ve seen on these forums, is what led me to directing GFSI-certified suppliers to skip what is effectively redundant questioning.

Any feedback at all is much appreciated!

It's typical with these kinds of questionnaires that if a company is GFSI certified they get to skip a lot of the content. For section 4.1, a lot of these documents may only be needed based on the context of what specifically you're sourcing from the supplier. For example, if you're sourcing a conventional ingredient you obviously won't be asking them for an organic certificate. Therefore I'd put some kind of preface to 4.1 saying "Please state whether the documents below could be made available to our staff at request." From there you'll need to decide which of these documents it would make sense for you to request to keep on file. 

Another option would be to give instruction in your emails to the supplier that you'd like "X" supporting documents for the ingredient you're looking to source. 

My suggestion would be to convert this into an Excel document. Then you can use conditional formatting and other tricks to highlight or gray-out information that would not apply to that supplier. Doing all that can be a lot of work, though. But then again, so is chasing suppliers for documentation, haha. And the excel form method doesn't always translate super-well, imex, so you can still run into an issue with suppliers not filling out all of the information you need from them.

But once you get it set up, it's kind of a nice tool. The sheet I use here also includes instructions at the top that if the facility or company has a standard information packet they send to customers that they can indicate that on this specific area of the top of the form, and then only the facility information and signature/ acknowledgement sections will become highlighted for them to fill out. If their standard packet doesn't address something, then I request additional information or documents.