Ninety vendors, one assessment cycle: eleven weeks to nineteen days

The situation

An urban co-operative bank with ninety active vendors ran its annual third-party assessment out of a shared workbook. Two people owned it. The cycle ran eleven weeks, most of which was spent chasing attachments over email.

What changed

The response-rate change did the real work. Vendors were not refusing to answer; they were losing the request in an inbox. A portal with its own reminder schedule removed the step that was failing.

What we would do differently

Tiering should have come first. The first cycle sent the full questionnaire to all ninety vendors, including the ones whose failure would have been an inconvenience rather than an incident. The second cycle sent a nine-question version to forty of them and finished a week earlier.