Skip to content

Supplier reviews and scorecard

The supplier scorecard rates and monitors supplier performance. It is shown as the Review tab on a deal and (in a reduced form) on the company dashboard. It combines a star-rating survey, computed turnover/payment timeliness grades, spend comparison reports, a buying-vs-non-buying branch map, and — for internal users — a negotiation quality score.

The Review tab appears when the site's deal review setting is on.

The rating survey

Members rate a supplier on four dimensions, each on a 5-star scale: Price, Quality, OTIF (on time and in full), and Sales & Support (also labeled Local Representation / Reps), plus an overall positive/neutral/negative. A reviewer may instead decline to review, with a reason.

Ratings are gathered through a review request (a lightweight survey, stored in its own tables — not the questionnaire feature):

  1. A deal administrator creates a review request with a deadline and up to three optional custom questions.
  2. Eligible participants — contacts at member companies that spend in the deal's categories and are tagged for review — get a task notification.
  3. Each participant submits their ratings and comments; the deal administrator is notified.

Scores are aggregated as the average of the last 365 days of responses and shown as read-only stars plus a per-response comment thread.

Computed grades

Beyond the survey, the scorecard grades the supplier on two operational measures, shown as period tiles:

  • Turnover score — how many days late the supplier is supplying turnover figures.
  • Payment score — how many days late rebate payments are.

Both roll up into letter grades, alongside an overall supplier grade.

Spend comparison and branch map

For figures-role users, the scorecard shows spend reports: this-year vs last-year per deal (with charts), the supplier's position within its category (members only), and top merchants by spend. A sales map plots buying branches (blue) against non-buying branches (red), plus tabs for merchants who spend in the category but not with this supplier, and merchants who don't spend in the category at all.

Negotiation quality (internal)

Visible only to the internal ebiz role, this scores how well a deal's rebate targets were negotiated, computed from the deal's stepped rebate bands:

  • Target realism — how few targets were set unreachably high.
  • Target stretch — how few were set so low they were easily exceeded.
  • Incentive quality — how many opportunities offer a worthwhile gain for extra spend.

These combine (weighted 40/30/30) into a percentage and letter grade. The scoring is done in the browser from the rebate index; the backend only returns the raw target data.

Comment retention

On the deal Review tab, the comment thread is trimmed to the site's comment retention window (a number of months) — a display filter only; comments are not deleted. The company-dashboard version does not apply this filter.

Who can see and manage reviews

The Review tab is gated by the deal review site setting; the spend reports need figures, and negotiation quality needs ebiz. Deleting a review comment is an admin action.

Why does the scorecard change unexpectedly

  • Star averages shifted — new responses came in, or older ones aged out of the 365-day window.
  • Grades moved with no review — the turnover/payment timeliness grades track figures submission and rebate payment dates.
  • The map or spend reports differ per user — spend visibility depends on the figures/member roles.

What the scorecard is not

  • Not the questionnaire/survey feature — despite the wording, supplier reviews use their own tables, unrelated to questionnaires.
  • Not part of the company profile panels — it is a separate view.
  • Not a rebate calculation — negotiation quality only assesses target setting; it does not change any rebate.