If you've received a Supplier Survey through 3E Exchange, chances are that one of your customers is asking you for information about your materials so they can better understand their supply chain. This information is then used to complete a variety of needs, including transparency reports such as Declare Labels, Health Product Declarations, or LEED v4 Material Ingredients. Entering requested information directly into 3E Exchange enables your customers to use the data quickly and saves you time in subsequent requests. The intention of sending a supplier survey is to gain a better understanding of one's supply chain as easily and efficiently as possible. 

We understand how important privacy and data protection are. For that reason, you have control over who can view your survey responses. Unless you choose otherwise, only the requesting user and their team can view your response. If your formulation is a trade secret, you can input a CAS # then mark it as proprietary which will hide the # while still allowing your customer to screen against regulatory lists. In this scenario, only hazard and non-identifying information is visible to your customer. 

Also, note that our standard terms of service include a non-disclosure agreement. This means we will never disclose your data unless you explicitly decide to disclose it yourself. While using 3E Exchange, you have total control of your data, who can see it, and if/when you would like to share it.

For more details, please visit our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. We also have a help article on Privacy and Confidentiality that provides a detailed look at how proprietary information is displayed in 3E Exchange.

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When you receive a survey request, your customer may be asking for a few different types of data that would traditionally be provided over a series of tedious and complicated email chains. Through 3E Exchange, you can provide your customers with all of the data they need in one, easy-to-use platform. 

Questionnaires that you receive can vary widely. Contact information, sustainability policies, VOC emissions, California Proposition 65, and more are examples of the types of information that you may see in a questionnaire. Your customers may also ask about material ingredients. This usually includes CAS numbers, weight data, and other substance-specific information. For this type of data, you can add substance data through the simple 3E Exchange data spreadsheet, a spreadsheet import, or even an SDS import.

You can now select to import one of their existing Digital Product Passports to directly populate answers to a survey request. If any data is missing from the existing passport, you can complete those answers and the DPP will be updated. 

For more instructions on how to respond to a survey, visit this help article: 

As sustainability reporting expands and product transparency becomes more and more mainstream, chances are you will begin to receive more and more material data requests. Luckily, we have 3E Exchange material passports to make data sharing and transparency easier than ever.

While you're responding to supplier surveys, in the "Submit Response" step, you will have the option to publish your passport to the Digital Product Passport Library (DPPL) at three different accessibility levels. These include public, restricted, or unlisted passports. You can then reuse this data and save time by pointing your customers to your material passport record in the future. If that doesn't quite work for you at this point, you can also copy the material you've filled out the survey for to your own materials library for future use on the "Wrap Up" page. 

Learn more about the Digital Product Passport Library (DPPL) here.