Configuring the Value Chain

1. Third party organizations must be configured as Locations.

2. Location Type can be set as “Supplier” for supplier third parties and as “Investee” for investee third parties.

3. A location’s Region cannot be blank (blank regions will be set to Earth). You should check if you have any locations set to Earth by either filtering for “Earth” in the Locations grid or the Organization Summary page shows you if you have locations set to Earth. Various features will not work if a location’s region is set to Earth.

4. Best practice would be for a group to be created for the relevant third party locations. For example, if the third party organization is a supplier, they should be added to a group called something like “Suppliers”. If the third party organization is a portfolio company/investee, they should be added to a group called something like “Investment Portfolio”. Then within that level 1 group you should categorise your third party locations into sub groups (level 2 or even level 3). For a supply chain, its likely that you would want to group suppliers by industry or product type. If you are only capturing qualitative data in third party surveys, or not linking any survey questions to Accounts, then the group could be a portfolio group as no data from the survey will be used for enterprise sustainability reporting. If survey questions will be linked to Accounts and that data will need to be reported as part of your enterprise sustainability reporting (for example, data for scope 3), then the group would need to be a classification group.

For a location's survey response to be included in the Survey Dataset, the location does need to be part of a classification group structure.

Best practice is to have no more than 200 locations (whether third party locations or your organization’s locations) in a sub group so that when requesting survey responses, ‘select all’ Locations from the Location pick list can be used to include all locations in the sub group.

Setting up Value Chain portal users

Value Chain portal users have an intuitive user interface to support an easy and informative survey data capture experience.

1. A location level user needs to be created for each Third Party Organization and given the Value Chain User role. Each user would be the person in their Third Party Organization responsible for filling in the value chain survey. It's recommended that the users' usernames are their email addresses so that it's easier to communicate login details to the third party users.

2. A Notification Contact needs to be created for each Third Party Organization (location) with the location level Value Chain User at each of those locations set up as the assignee for Issue Type Value Chain Surveys. You only need to set up for Issue Type “Standard” as the Issues that are automatically created when Survey Responses are created will be of priority Standard. Watchers are not relevant for this alert class.

Since the Issue Trackingtool is used to manage the workflow of survey responses, all users who need to be able to change the status of Issues must be given the Issue Manager work role.