Supplier quality
No supplier is approved indefinitely
You send a supplier a questionnaire, they answer it themselves, you score what comes back and somebody decides. The decision is never open-ended: before anyone can be approved you have to say when you will look again, and on that date the evaluation reopens and the questionnaire goes out afresh.
What happens to a request
- You
Say why you are evaluating them
A new supplier, a scheduled review, a change in their circumstances or a performance concern — and what they would supply, how critical it is, and whether they would be your only source. What you expect to spend is recorded here and never shown to them.
- Supplier
Fills in the questionnaire
Twenty questions in their own hands: who they are, their quality system and its expiry date, their policies, their insurance and their continuity plan. Eight have to be answered, and they answer them rather than you transcribing a PDF somebody emailed.
- You
Score what came back
Quality, commercial and delivery capability out of ten, a financial risk rating and a written summary — all required. Anything unclear goes back to them as a question, and their answer lands beside it rather than in somebody's inbox.
- You
Decide, one of three ways
A Category Director approves, approves with conditions, or rejects. The clean approval is recorded as an approval with a name against it; the other two will not move without a written reason. All three need the tier and the rationale, and none of them will go through without a review date.
- You
It comes back by itself
On the review date the evaluation reopens and goes straight back to the questionnaire. A conditional approval comes back sooner — on the date the conditions were due, not at the annual review.
An approval you cannot leave open
The review date is required before the decision will go through, and the rule that reopens the evaluation runs on that same date. So the lapse is not a reminder anybody set and not a report anybody runs — a supplier approved three years ago and never looked at again is a thing this area will not produce.
The responsible-business questions are not optional
Of the twenty questions put to the supplier, eight must be answered — and four of those are your code of conduct, modern slavery, anti-bribery, and exposure to sanctioned countries or parties. A supplier cannot reach your evaluators having quietly skipped them.
Conditions are shared; judgement is not
What they must do, and the date they must do it by, are visible to them — a condition the supplier cannot see is not a condition. The scores, the tier, the rationale and what you expect to spend are not, so you can write down what you actually think without writing it to them.
Re-evaluating is the same route, not a new one
A review goes back to the questionnaire the supplier already knows, through the same scoring and the same decision. So this year's evidence sits beside last year's on one record, rather than in whichever spreadsheet the review was done in that year.
Approval is a date, not a status
The failure this area is built against is not a bad supplier getting approved. It is a good one approved in 2023, whose certificate lapsed in 2024 and whose owner changed in 2025, still sitting on the approved list because nothing ever asked again. Here the asking is the workflow: the date is required before anyone is approved, and when it arrives the evaluation reopens whether or not it is on anybody's list.
Start with it