Downloads

When you are interested to do your own analytics and compare suppliers outside the online tools provided by the platform, you will want to choose the correct download option for your use case. Any analysis starts with answering the following questions for yourself:

  1. Which suppliers should be included?
  2. Which metrics are relevant?
  3. What timeframes should be considered?
  4. What download format should I use?

Which suppliers should be included?

If you are strictly interested in the suppliers you explicitely requested a response from this year, or last year, you will want to use download options in the Engage dashboard.

If you are interested in all profiles you have information about, either because you invited them to respond in previous year, or those profiles shared their assessment with your organization pro-actively, you will want to use download options in the Track dashboard.

Which metrics are relevant?

When you are interested in response rates between last year and this year, you will want information that is directly represented in the dashboard you are looking at. These are available under the Download or Download (pivotable) option.

When you are interested in answers to actual questions in the questionnaire, you will want to use the Answers & scores and Answers & scores (pivotable) options.

Some questionnaires also duplicate questions as a planning stage (i.e. practices the supplier is not currently implementing but expect to work on in the current year). These answers are available under the optional Planned improvements and Planned improvements (pivotable) options.

Finally some supplier responses are reviewed by a third-party verifier that checks suppporting documentation to validate supplier-provided answers. These optional verifiers opinions are available under the Verification or Verification (pivotable) option.

What timeframes should be considered?

Suppliers can take an assessment at anytime. Furthermore they can also update their response multiple times within any given time period.

Because you are generally only interested in one-response per supplier per time period, downloads will retrieve the latest response from a supplier that is no later than the cut-off date you specify in the To field on a dashboard.

In large timeframes (i.e. a year), supplier answers are stable, and it won't impact your analysis. If you are starting to reduce the timeframe to a week, or at the edge of period (ex: Dec 31st vs. Jan 1st), you might start to notice these data sampling effects.

What download format should I use?

All downloads are typically provided in two options:

  • A tabular format, well-suited for reading results directly in a spreadsheet application.
  • A pivotable format, better-suited for importing into analytics applications such as PowerBI for example.

Answers & scores in pivotable format

When you download answers & scores in pivotable format, you will get a spreadsheet where each row represents an answer data point. The column headers are:

  1. Created at
    The date/time at which the answer was created. That is the date/time when the response this answer is part of was marked complete.
  2. SupplierID
    The external ID you specified through your organization's dashboard in order to connect a supplier to any internal ERP system you might have.
  3. Profile name
    The supplier profile name as shown on TSP.
  4. Measured
    The actual answer (ex: 'Yes', 'No', etc.)
  5. Unit
    The unit for the answer. It can be a SI unit (ex: 'm', 'kg'), a US customary unit (ex: ft, lb), an enumerated unit (ex: 'Yes', 'No'), a free-form text comment, etc.
  6. Question title
    The title of the question as it appears
  7. Question RefNum
    The reference number of the question as it appears

How measurement over a time period are recorded?

In many cases you will see one or two rows for each answer: One for the answer itself, and optionally one free-form text supporting statement for the answer.

For questions that record measurement over a time period (ex: "Total Scope 1 GHG Emissions"), you will see a block of rows in the pivotable spreadsheet that look like this:

Measured Unit
number Metric Tons / Period
date Starts at
date Ends at
supporting documentation Comments

The block of rows is then interpretated as:

"The supplier reported Total Scope 1 GHG Emissions of number metric tons of CO-equivalent between Starts at date and Ends at date."

Need additional help?
Contact us