I still see hundreds of questionnaires asking our clients their BEE status. Most questionnaires are not very comprehensive - they still tend to ask only ownership and management questions.

Yesterday we saw a very good questionnaire from one of the large corporates. It stuck faithfully to the generic scorecard - a vast imporvement over its previous efforts which was only ownership based. The problem is our client is a QSE so he should rather to fill in a QSE questionnaire - which was not available.

We recommended to him:
That he should fill in the form to the best of his ability and include a covering letter stating the following:

(Company name) is in the business sector of the economy and our turnover does not exceed R10 million per annum. In terms of the draft codes of good practice as issued by the dti on 20th december 2005, (Company Name) is therefore defined as a QSE (qualifying small enterprise) and we request (Customer name) to base our score on the QSE scorecard, which is attached.

In most cases the corporation will be happy to receive such a request.

The above is why we do not like complex questionnaires. Our own questionnaire asks no more than the minimum necessary for us to categorise our supplier.
All we really need to know is:
1) company Name etc
2) The size of the company - EME, QSE or Generic
3) Their BEE level - e.g 1 to 8 or non-compliant.

I'll put a sample of our own questionnaire up on this website in a day or two. Keep visiting!

If only every company would use this procedure - it would make everyone's lives so much easier - no having to fill in pages and pages of the same old forms!