One RFQ reaches the whole network
The spec goes out to every supplier you want on the bid at once, whether that is your own roster, the Open Network, or both. Adding a supplier to the send costs a checkbox.
Use cases · FieldworkOS
Run every supplier from one screen
The daily bottleneck for an agency, the whole operations team for a solo consultant, and the partner layer for a panel company. Past two or three suppliers, coordination becomes the job, and that manual tax quietly caps how many suppliers anyone is willing to run.
Three products, one job
- Open NetworkReach the audience no single panel can fill
- FieldworkOSRun every supplier from one screen
- SurveyGuardStop fraud at the door, not at reconciliation
All three work alone. Which one you reach for first depends on who you are and what is breaking.
The problem it solves
The tax is paid in hours,
and charged in reach.
A project manager running multi-supplier sample loses two to four hours a day to work that produces nothing: parsing quote emails, re-keying CPIs into a comparison spreadsheet, chasing test IDs, refreshing dashboards, and reconciling three sources at close.
Because that cost is per supplier, it sets a ceiling on how wide anyone will go. The fourth supplier is a judgement call, the seventh is unthinkable, and the audience that needed six gets quoted as not feasible. That is an operations problem wearing a supply problem’s clothes.
On a tight field window, most of the loss lands before field even opens. The RFQ round, the quote comparison, the negotiation and the link testing eat the days you meant to spend fielding.
The coordination tax, per supplier
2 to 4 hrs a dayEmail triage & transcription
92% · daily
Quote comparison rebuilds
70% · per bid
Link setup & test-ID swaps
64% · per launch
Dashboard refreshing
86% · all day
Reconciliation archaeology
78% · per close
Share of each job that is mechanical enough to hand to the system. None of it is research. All of it scales linearly with the number of suppliers on the study, which is exactly why teams stop adding them.
What FieldworkOS does
One RFQ out, one comparable view back, one state per supplier.
FieldworkOS runs the supplier lifecycle end to end, and it runs over email, so suppliers change nothing on their side to work with you through it.
AI parses every reply, whatever the format
Quotes arrive as email bodies, PDFs and spreadsheets, and come back to you as one comparable view at quota-cell level: CPI, feasibility, LOI and turnaround, side by side.
CPI negotiated down to the cell, within your bounds
Counter-offers are made against real data and inside limits you set, so negotiation quality does not depend on which project manager happened to pick up the thread.
Go-live gated on tested redirects, not a calendar date
Launch waits on verified links and real soft-launch signal. A study cannot go live on the strength of someone saying the links were probably fine.
Every supplier in one explicit state
RFQ sent, under negotiation, awaiting test IDs, live, paused for quality, reconciling, invoiced. One screen answers where every supplier on every survey is, and every number drills to the row that produced it.
Reconciliation computed, not excavated
Completes are matched across sources at close and the schedule comes out line by line, in minutes rather than days of email archaeology, with the evidence trail attached.
Every AI extraction, negotiation step, verification, alert and state change is logged. The state machine is what enforces the rules: no launch before link tests pass, and no resume before a confirmed retest.
Use cases by team
Where the coordination tax actually bites.
Agencies feel it as capacity per project manager. Independents feel it as work with nobody to hand it to. Suppliers feel it in the partner layer. Insights teams feel it as documentation they cannot produce and invoices they cannot check.
Close the last quota cell
The study is 92% complete and 0% delivered, because one rare cell sits at 31 of 75. No single supplier holds the missing respondents, but four together do. FieldworkOS makes adding those four cost what adding the first one did: one RFQ, parsed quotes, onboarding that proceeds on its own when a rate lands inside your bounds.
The two-week turnaround
On a tight field window the pre-field week is the whole risk. Compressing the RFQ round, quote parsing, negotiation and link testing from days into hours means the field days get spent fielding instead of preparing.
“Where is every supplier right now?”
Ops leaders get one live answer instead of an inbox, three spreadsheets and a WhatsApp thread. Every figure on the screen drills back to the row it came from, so the answer survives the follow-up question.
Give project managers their day back
Quotes are parsed at high confidence and only the edge cases reach a human, pre-structured for one-click review. Hours of daily triage become a short queue, and the hours that come back are the ones worth paying a project manager for.
Run multi-supplier fieldwork alone
With no project management team behind you, coordinating even three suppliers by hand is a full-time job on top of the research. One RFQ, parsed quotes and one state view are what let a one-person shop field the same study an agency would.
Run your partner layer as a system
When a hard quota pushes a study past your own panel and into partners, the partner layer is coordinated the same way: one RFQ across partners, quotes parsed, states tracked, and per-partner thresholds that pause one partner on a breach without stopping the study.
Never re-burn an irreplaceable pool
At 8% incidence, sample you lose is sample you cannot buy again. In-field monitoring surfaces an over-terminating screener or a sourcing problem in the first hour rather than in the second week, while there is still a pool left to protect.
A defensible, auditable trail
Insights teams get a complete record of who was sourced, at what rate, and what happened in field: the documentation that makes a methodology hold up when procurement, compliance or a sceptical stakeholder asks how the sample was actually built.
Honest invoices
Respondent-level rate tagging means a mid-field CPI change on one hard quota cannot quietly rebill the whole study. The line-by-line schedule at close is the one you agreed to, and billing accuracy is one of the six metrics that follows the supplier afterwards.
The outcome
Going wide costs nothing.
The ninth supplier is as cheap to run as the first, so the number of suppliers on a study becomes a research decision rather than a staffing one. Once that ceiling is gone, “not feasible” stops being an operations problem masquerading as a supply problem.
Pairs with
Every respondent those suppliers deliver still has to be real.
Running nine suppliers cleanly is not the same as trusting what the nine send you. The wider you go, and the more expensive each complete gets, the harder the incentive pushes on the people you are paying. That is what SurveyGuard is for.
Which product first
All three work alone. Who you are decides where you start.
Together they cover sourcing a study, running it, and protecting what comes back. Nothing here has to be adopted in order.
| If you are | Start with | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Client-side insights | SurveyGuard | Your name is on the data's integrity. |
| Full-service agency | FieldworkOS | Coordination is your daily bottleneck. |
| Independent researcher | FieldworkOS | It is the operations team you do not have. |
| Sample supplier | FieldworkOS | Your partner layer needs a system. |
| Healthcare / specialist | Open Network | Reaching the audience is the hard part. |
Want to see all three on one study rather than product by product? The hard-to-reach sample walkthrough follows a single German healthcare study through six steps, from the shortfall to the reconciled invoice.
See it on your own work
Count the suppliers you left off the last hard study.
Whatever that number is, it was set by coordination cost rather than by supply. Bring a live study and we will walk it through the lifecycle as it would actually run.