Under clause 8.4 of ISO 9001:2015, "Control of externally provided processes, products and services", your organisation must:

• establish criteria to evaluate external providers' performance
• document the results of the evaluation or re-evaluation, and
• document any necessary action. 

If you are currently using spreadsheets or paper forms to manage your suppliers, you're going to run into difficulty. 

Successfully assessing your suppliers is essential if you're to be serious about delivering a high-quality service while mitigating the huge risks involved in any part of a supply chain. If a key supplier can't deliver on time, how will that affect your business? What costs will delays have for your budgets – and your reputation?

An effective quality management system will enable you to conduct comprehensive assessments of your suppliers at every stage of the lifecycle, from pilot and trial, to onboarding, to continuous improvement. A supplier who isn't delivering on agreements will cost you time and money, and could impose further risks on your supply chain too.

EQMS Audit and Inspection Manager is designed to make assessing your suppliers easy. You can even take the app, iEQMS Auditor, to your supplier's site and conduct an audit offline without having to duplicate any work later on.

A full audit of your supplier at the trial and onboarding stage of the process allows you to anticipate and mitigate potential pitfalls that supplier might bring. From there, regular audits and performance reviews ensure your business is receiving the very best service at the best price, at all times.

EQMS Audit and Inspection Manager provides you with real-time reporting at any time, presenting information in visual graphs on a need-to-know basis, so you can tailor data to your audience. Keep track of your suppliers' performance, maintain positive relationships, and ensure best practice by implementing a comprehensive audit and review system.

What you should do now

Download our ISO 9001:2015 Supplier Management Toolkit to learn how Carillion Direct Sourcing uses EQMS to conduct thousands of audits.