Topic
Eighty questions, ten days, and a deal at stake.
The questionnaire arrives after the commercial agreement and before signature. It is not negotiable, it is timed, and nobody on the team has room for it.
The situation
The document goes to the technical director, who passes it to a developer, who answers what they know and leaves the rest blank. It comes back to the salesperson, who fills the blanks with whatever sounds reassuring. Nobody reads the whole thing.
That mechanism creates two risks. The first is answering yes to a control that does not exist, which becomes a contractual commitment and a real problem at the first audit. The second is answering no to a control that does exist but that nobody could document, and losing a deal for nothing.
The third effect, quieter, is drift: the answer given to this client does not match the one given to the last. Large corporates sometimes share supplier assessments, and an auditor always compares against the previous version.
How each question is handled
Every question on the form goes through the same route.
- An answer already exists in the library
- It is reused, its evidence is checked as still current, and the verification date is updated. This covers the large majority of questions from the second questionnaire onwards.
- The question is worded differently but covers the same requirement
- The existing answer is adapted to the wording without changing the substance. The mapping between the two wordings is recorded so the next occurrence is immediate.
- The control exists but nothing documents it
- We produce the missing evidence where that is feasible within the deadline, for example a written procedure or a review record. Otherwise the answer describes the practice and states honestly that formalisation is under way, with its deadline.
- The control does not exist
- The gap is declared, with the owner, the deadline and the compensating control if there is one. We do not draft an answer the evidence does not support, even under commercial pressure.
The point we do not concede
We do not write that a control exists when it does not. That position sometimes costs a more favourable answer in the short term. It protects you from a false contractual commitment, which is paid for far more dearly at the renewal audit or during an incident.
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