Purchasing organizations in manufacturers, recognizing the importance of communication with suppliers, use a variety of methods to make certain that there is open communication between themselves and their suppliers. The methods include supplier advisory councils, supplier forums for their top suppliers, annual supplier meetings, and regular meetings between top Purchasing management and supplier top management. The major limitation of all of these activities, however, is that only a few suppliers typically have the opportunity to make known their concerns. While the concerns may be of unquestioned importance to the suppliers who are discussing them, there is no way to determine the extent to which the concerns are important across the broader supply base.

There are two major methodologies that PPI uses that overcome the limitation of too few suppliers being involved in sharing their opinions, voicing their concerns, indicating issues, and identifying strengths and weaknesses associated with their working relations with their manufacturing customer. First, is the use of bi-annual large-scale Internet-based or written surveys that cover a broad range of topics. The second is the use of Internet-based frequent highly-focused pulse surveys.

Large scale surveys can be used to obtain the opinions of a large number of suppliers across a broad range of supplier-related interfacing activities that can be analyzed on the basis of a wide range of manufacturing client and supplier characteristics.

Pulse surveys, on the other hand, are used, on an as-needed basis, to obtain quickly in-depth opinions of a large number of suppliers on a specific topic. The pulse survey typically involves a questionnaire that asks a series of highly focused questions associated with a single topic that can be answered in five to ten minutes.