Supplier quality

Supplier quality in Keel

Supplier quality covers ISO 9001 Clause 8.4: controlling the externally provided processes, products, and services your organization relies on. It’s the product-quality view of your suppliers, distinct from the security-focused vendor risk inventory.

Build your approved-supplier list

In Supplier quality, add each supplier with its category, a contact, and a qualification status: pending, approved, conditional, or disqualified. Give it a quality score (0–100), mark whether it’s on your approved-supplier list (ASL), and set a next re-evaluation date. Keel flags suppliers whose re-eval date has arrived so evaluation and re-evaluation happen on a cadence, as Clause 8.4 expects.

Raise a SCAR

When a supplier misses the mark, raise a Supplier Corrective Action Request (SCAR) against it, with a code, the issue, a severity (minor, major, or critical), and a due date. A SCAR is the supplier-facing sibling of your internal CAPA loop, and it moves forward one step at a time:

Open → Containment → Corrective action → Verify → Closed

Each open SCAR shows against its supplier and rolls up into the Open SCARs count on the Quality dashboard, so nothing is left hanging.

Tip

Supplier quality and vendor risk answer different questions: one is “can this supplier consistently meet our quality requirements?” (Clause 8.4), the other is “how much security risk does this third party carry?” A supplier can appear in both.

Next steps

• Nonconforming outputs: log a supplier-caused NCR that a SCAR then addresses.
• Vendor risk: manage the security and data-access side of third parties.