New tool allows you to source a standard list of documents from each supplier

As part of your routine supplier control measures you would typically have to source the same documents from each supplier. The typical process would be to email the supplier with a list of required documents and questionnaires and tell them to respond to you. Once they reply, you would check the documents and put them in their correct place.

This is obviously incredibly cumbersome. Who would want to do this manually?

Introducing Doclists

We are introducing a new tool that is designed to help you source a standard list of documents from all of your suppliers. The new tool is called Doclist and it’s found under the “Categories” module.

Essentially a doclist is a list of document names. But it’s of course much more than that. You see the doclist is seriously smart too.

When you embed doclists to any of your supplier audit programs, supplier self assessments or material assessments you and your supplier will be asked to upload these documents and set review dates. After you’ve completed this, the documents will be automatically stored in the document control module under the supplier’s own folder.

Example of using the new tool

Step 1: Prepare your doclist

First you need to create your doclist. You can do this in the Categories module. In the above example we’ve listed five documents that we want the supplier to upload. Please read the user guide article for some important tips.

Step 2: Embed your doclist into a supplier audit or material assessment program

You then need to add your new doclist to any of the supplier control programs. In the example above we embedded the new doclist into a supplier self-assessment, but it might just as well have been a material assessment or a supplier audit program. We then enabled the scheduling which will automatically schedule this audit to repeat every year.

Step 3: Fill in the audit or let your supplier do it

When your audit is due, you and your supplier will be notified. The supplier can work through the audit in the Supplier Portal and you can do the same work through the application – anyway you prefer. The supplier can upload the documents and set review dates for the documents. Setting a review date here will later make the software automatically prompt you and the supplier about reviewing that document and uploading the latest version.

Step 4: Log into the documents module and marvel

As soon as you or the supplier have hit “Save & Submit” in the audit the documents will have been uploaded into the document control module and into the suppliers own folder. And notice how the naming of the documents is automatically done based on your doclist.

So essentially this new tool ensures that you can get the same standard list of documents from all your suppliers, the documents are automatically named for consistency and stored in the correct folder. Even the reviews will be scheduled automatically. All notifications and messages between you and the supplier can be automated – so there is no manual emailing required at any stage.

Pretty convenient – wouldn’t you say?