Standard procurement questionnaires are built for commodity buying: certifications, insurance, payment terms, quality system. Those matter and none of them predicts whether a box will still be in service in five years. A short supplementary questionnaire does.
One: can you show the load case in writing
Ask for contents weight, stack load at the bottom position with a stated stack height, and maximum unsupported span. A supplier who answers with a single capacity figure is working from a table rather than from your application.
Two: what is the return configuration
Nesting ratio or flat-pack height, and how the box is rebuilt. A number, not a description. If the answer is that the box is rigid, that is fine and it should be stated, because it changes the freight calculation and it should change the quotation comparison.
Three: what wears out and how is it replaced
Name the wear parts, give them part numbers and prices, and confirm they can be bought individually. This single answer predicts the running cost of the fleet more accurately than anything else on the questionnaire, and it is the question suppliers least like. The reasoning is set out in budgeting spares and repairs.
Four: which dimensions are held
Ask for the squareness figure held on every box and the tolerance on the opening. Those two decide whether a stack goes up straight. Everything else on the drawing can be generous and no one will notice.
Five: what the material is
Polymer, recycled content and its stream, and what is attached to the box that is not the same material. This answer is required for the end-of-life route and for any recycled content claim, and it is difficult to obtain retroactively.
Six: what the end-of-life route is
Will they take boxes back, and will they provide a recycling record? A supplier who can answer this is thinking about the product over its life; one who cannot is selling units.
Seven: can you freeze the drawing
Ask for a revision number and a commitment that the specification will not change without notice. This matters more in regulated applications and it is worth knowing the answer everywhere, because a silent change to a panel thickness is invisible until something fails.
Eight: what does a pilot order look like
The quantity, the price, the lead time and the tooling position for a trial run rather than a fleet. A supplier who will support a pilot is a supplier who expects to be judged on performance, and it is the fastest way to find out whether the design advice is real. When you have the answers, the comparison is the one set out in reading a quotation line by line.
Why the standard questionnaire misses
Certificates tell you a supplier has a quality system. They do not tell you whether the person designing your box has ever watched one fail. The eight questions above are all answerable in a few lines by somebody who designs containers, and they are all difficult to answer convincingly by somebody who resells them. That is the point of asking.
Send the questionnaire before the quotation rather than with it, and read the answers as a body rather than individually. A supplier who answers seven well and refuses one is telling you something specific about that one. A supplier who answers all eight with a single paragraph of marketing is telling you something more general. Neither is necessarily disqualifying, and both are worth knowing before the first purchase order rather than after the third.
What we can do
We build PP honeycomb board boxes and answer all eight of those questions as a matter of course. Send us the questionnaire you use and we will fill it in, including the parts most suppliers leave blank.