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What is supplier engagement

Supplier engagement involves engaging the supplier through the tool. Responsibly automatically sends out engagements on emails, but the links to the engagement can be copied and sent through other channels manually. A supplier can be engaged in two ways: i. Engagement templates: a template that you engage multiple suppliers on with content including questions, files, descriptions and other instructions.
  • Read more about engagement templates here.
ii. To-dos: specific instructions for a supplier related to to-dos created in your system. Most often used for corrective action, but can also be used to manage other programs like ensuring suppliers commit to SBTi targets.
  • Read more about engaging on Tasks here.
It’s free for a supplier to be engaged through Responsibly.

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How to reduce the supplier burden of engagement

While engagement can be a helpful tool to communicate your objectives with the supplier, increase awareness and take preventative action; engagement has also become a significant problem in recent years as suppliers are drowning in questionnaires, tying up most resources in answering questions rather than improvement. As a result, modern due diligence legislation like the CSDDD are stressing the need to minimize engagement and reduce the burden on the supplier. In Responsibly, you have multiple tools at your disposal to reduce engagement: i. Strong segmentation based on baseline: we always recommended companies take an onion approach to supplier due diligence. Upload all suppliers to Responsibly to use the due diligence engines to baseline the suppliers existing actions. Based on the results, create a targeted strategy of suppliers you keep to monitoring, suppliers you may engage for preventative action, supplier to engage for corrective action, and potentially suppliers set aside for physical audits.
  • Read more about supplier segmentation here.
ii. Dynamic engagement templates: Instead of creating a one-size-fits-non questionnaire where suppliers get asked about everything, you can right size the templates to the suppliers risk profile and existing actions. Only ask questions about child labor if child labor is actually analyzed to be a risk with that supplier. Consider whether existing actions like policies or certifications can reduce the need for further questions. this can be done both at a high level where entire sections can be excluded if the supplier has a certain profile, but it can also be done in the engagement template based on the answers to prior questions. The logic here can get extensive so check out our pre-set engagement templates with logic built-in.
  • Read more about dynamic engagement here.
iii. AI answers: Some questions you may not need to ask - e.g., we have already fetched certification or emission KPIs from public communications. But some questions you can also run by the digital twin first - we call this ‘AI Answers’. In short, it allows you to take any question you have created for the human, and use advanced retrieval techniques to search all the files we have on that supplier (which typically includes their entire website, reporting, policies, and more), and then generate an answer to your specific question, citing the sources in the supplier’s digital twin. This can be incredibly powerful, and it goes together with the dynamic engagement templates above to further right-size an engagement.
  • Read more about AI Answers here.
iv. Supplier co-pilot: The technology available to you through AI Answers is also available to the supplier through the supplier co-pilot. This means the supplier can upload any information, including questionnaire they have previously sent to other customers, and use that as a baseline to quickly draft up answers to you specific questions. While it does not reduce the amount of questions you are asking, it significantly speeds up your supplier’s processing of the questionnaire.
  • Read more about the supplier co-pilot here.