How to Assess a Vendor Product- Old UI

Vendor Assessments are used to to assess entities that are external to your organization. Typically, vendor assessments are used to provide a survey of questions about a specific product or offering, which is filled out by a representative from the vendor.

You must have a role in an organizational unit to create a vendor assessment.

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Before you can create a Vendor Assessment, there must be an existing vendor assessment series and at least one vendor question list. Only superusers can create new assessment series and question lists.

Log into Isora GRC and go to the Assessment page. Click the New Assessment button.

Choose Vendor as the Target Type. This will adjust the rest of the options presented in the dialog. There should be a default Vendor assessment series. Choose a question list and optionally assign a name. Then click the Select Product link.
See also: Tutorial: Make a Vendor Assessment Series

Fill in the product and vendor details and click Select.

If you have roles in multiple OUs, choose which one you want this vendor assessment to be associated with as the Requestor. Choose an expiration date which is far enough in the future to allow adequate time for the survey to be completed. If the survey is not completed in time, the assessment will disappear from Isora GRC. If you want to allow people from other OUs to be able to view the report, then check the checkbox to “Allow report to be viewed by other users.” Click Save.

Back on the Open tab of the Assessment page, expand the Vendor series and locate the new assessment you just created. Click the Launch button.

After launching, you can click the product name or the View button to access the survey. You should copy the Access Link and email it to the representative from your vendor so they can answer the questions.

After all questions have been answered, the vendor rep can acknowledge the survey to indicate completion. Or, if you wish to review and possibly question the vendor rep about any of their answers before they submit it, then ask to let you do the acknowledgement step.

Once the survey has been acknowledged, it will appear as a report on the Complete tab of the Assessment page. Click the View Report button to see details of the assessment.

To see the individual questions and answers, you can click on Answer Details.

You can also download a CSV of the report.

How to Assess a Third-Party Vendor Product- New UI

To create a new third-party vendor product assessment, complete these steps.

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Prerequisites: You need at least one unit, a series targeting vendors, and a questionnaire template targeting vendors.

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There is currently no way to save your progress in the middle of the wizard. If you exit the wizard without completing it, your progress will be lost.

On the Assessments page, click New Assessment in the upper right-hand corner. (Note that it doesn’t matter which tab you are currently on when you click this button.)

On the New Assessment dialog, choose Third-Party Vendor.

Expand a vendor name to choose an existing product under it, or click + Add New Product.

If you need to add a new product, you can select an existing vendor name or type in a new one. Then type in a product name (then click Select) and choose a vertical.

After completing all fields, click Create Product. A new product entry will be created in Isora GRC’s inventory.

If you chose an existing product that was previously assessed, you’ll see a list of past assessments to choose from. If you choose one of those, a number of choices will be automatically filled in for you in the wizard, expediting the process.

If you just created the product, then there won’t be any past assessments to choose from, so you just click Next Step.

The next step is Intake. This is where you must specify a deployment for the product. If it was previously deployed, then you can choose an existing one. If not, you’ll need to create one. This is meant to keep track of which unit is actually using or managing the product. If you are assessing the product as part of the procurement process, typically the deploying unit would be the unit that’s requesting to purchase the product. (See also: Third-Party Vendor Product Deployments )
For a new product, click Add Deployment.

Fill in the fields and click Create Deployment. Note that there are some optional fields that don’t display by default, so click Display Optional Fields if you want to fill those in now. You can also add that information to the deployment later. (Note: if you don’t know the right option to choose for any of the required fields, take your best guess. All of the fields can be updated later.)

The deployment you just created is selected. Click Next Step.

On the Details step of the wizard, give the assessment a name, assign it to a series, assign a due date, and choose instructions to include. Try to allow enough time that your vendor representative can realistically complete the assessment.

There are default instructions installed on your instance of Isora GRC, but you may want to create a specific template to use for vendor assessments. You can edit the existing instructions and optionally save them as a new template using the three dots in the upper right-hand corner. You may consider updating the instructions (without saving as a new template) to personalize the instructions for that vendor as well. These instructions will appear at the top of the survey that gets created when you create the assessment.

Once all fields are completed to your satisfaction, click Next Step.

The next step is to choose a questionnaire template. You need to already have at least one questionnaire template that targets vendors in order to complete this step. Choose one, then click Next Step.
(See also: What is a questionnaire template? )

The last step of the wizard presents a summary of everything you have done so far. It’s possible at this point to make changes if you mouse over the right-hand side of a field you want to change, and click the pencil. Otherwise, click Publish to save the assessment without launching (you can launch it later, but you won’t be able to make edits), or Launch to make the survey available for completion.

Upon launching, an access link is shown. Click the boxes next to it to copy it to your clipboard. You can then email the link to your vendor representative to ask them to fill it out.

How to find the link later

If you lose track of the survey link and you need to find it again, you find it again on the Assessments page.

Go to the Third-Parties tab and expand the target Series.

Locate the name of the product and expand it. Locate the assessment you’re looking for and click the access link to copy it to your clipboard.
In the future, it will be possible to search for assessments by name and other characteristics. At present, on this page you can only search by the series name.