Working with a number of businesses that have to annually complete these pre-qualifications it’s become clear how difficult the businesses are finding it to complete them.

One director recently suggested he would discuss with his fellow directors employing us to provide more support in this area. He said that they are taking up far too much of his sales team time and that they tended to have limited knowledge of what was being asked for in the first instance. Clearly part of this could be addressed through training to bring their knowledge to the necessary level; but time remains a key concern.

The business is consistently facing requests for more and more information to be provided leading to pages and pages of form filling and searching for the relevant information. It does beg the question who are these questionnaires in aid of; do their clients really require so much information or is it an industry in itself!

As he said it wouldn’t be so bad if we could just complete one and submit this for subsequent requests with only minor adjustments required; unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. Each seem to phrase its questions differently and require more information than the last one and the problem is if they don’t fill them in they won’t make the approved supplier list.

Oh for the day when one scheme covers all; something that would help the businesses but would financially hit those that mange these schemes.