Whitepaper Wednesday - Supplier Insurance Requirements

Welcome back to another installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on the Purchasing Certification Blog. Yes, I know it’s Thursday, but I just had to take a second look at today’s whitepaper before I released this review. You’ll know why shortly.

Today, I’ll be reviewing a “research snapshot” (which, for the sake of the occasion, I’ll refer to as a whitepaper) entitled “Insurance Requirements and Certificates for Suppliers” from CAPS Research. When reading the teaser for this whitepaper, I hoped that I would get a good feel for how many companies require their suppliers to maintain larger-than-required-by-law amounts of insurance, how many require suppliers to provide certificates of insurance, and how many do not require suppliers to provide certificates of insurance.

After reading the whitepaper, I don’t feel confident that I learned what I wanted to learn.

There were 24 percentages listed in the whitepaper. Twenty of them were calculated incorrectly!

For example, the whitepaper says that it received responses from 51 manufacturing organizations. In calculating the “percent of organizations that require suppliers to maintain additional types and amounts of insurance beyond the requirements of the state or nation where work is being performed,” the whitepaper indicated that 47 organizations did, but listed the percentage as 85.5%. Forty-seven out of 51 is 92.2%. Forty-seven is 85.5% of 55.

I could forgive CAPS if this was an isolated error. But these errors were made throughout, rendering the whitepaper a shoddy piece of research in my eyes and one not to be trusted. Therefore, I will not even bother writing anything else about this abomination of a whitepaper.

If you would like to download this whitepaper for yourself – maybe, after reading this post, CAPS will fix their math – you can do so from the CAPS Research website (registration required).

To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Find More Good Resources For Procurement Leaders?
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