Suppliers

In one sentence

The Suppliers module is the place every other module reaches when it needs to say "this came from vendor X" — one record per supplier, sequential numbers per facility, and a profile that pulls in everywhere that supplier shows up across the rest of QFormance.

Creating a supplier

From Sidebar → Suppliers, click New supplier. The form captures:

• Name — the legal or commercial name. Required.
• Category — admin-managed list (see Categories below).
• Status — Active, Inactive, Pending, or Blocked. New suppliers default to Pending until QA approves them.
• Contact name — your main point of contact at the supplier. Optional, and surfaced as its own Contact column in the directory so you can see at a glance who to call.
• Contact info — website, email, phone, address. All optional.
• Notes — free-text context, audit history references, anything you want surfaced on the profile.

Submit and you land on the supplier's profile. The supplier exists at the organization level — at this point it has no facility number yet.

Adding a supplier to a facility

A supplier doesn't get a number until you add it to a facility. From the supplier's profile, the Facilities section has an Add facility button.

When you add a facility:

• A sequential number is assigned — SUP-001, SUP-002, etc. The next number comes from the facility's running counter, so each facility has its own series.
• You can set a per-facility status and risk level independently of the org-level status.
• If you have permission, you can record an ASL number (see below).

Adding the same supplier to two facilities gives you two numbers — Vendor X may be SUP-014 at Birmingham and SUP-007 at Toledo. The numbers reflect when each site started using them, not anything global.

Legible URLs

Supplier profile pages have readable URLs derived from the name — e.g. /suppliers/precision-castings-inc rather than a long ID. The slug refreshes automatically if the supplier is renamed. Older ID-based links still resolve.

ASL numbers — permission-gated

The ASL (Approved Supplier List) number is an optional field on the per-facility record. It's gated to the suppliers.manage_asl permission, which means:

• Users without it never see the field — it doesn't render on the profile or in lists.
• Users with it can read, set, and edit ASL numbers per facility.

That separation matters because ASLs are often maintained by a small QA group and shared across facilities, while the supplier directory itself is open to anyone raising NCRs.

Categories

Categories are an org-level, admin-managed list. From Admin → Suppliers anyone with the Edit org settings permission can:

• Add, rename, or delete a category.
• Re-order them — the order is the order they appear in pickers and lists.

Default categories are seeded for new orgs (Materials, Services, Calibration, Subcontract — typical QMS divisions) but you can replace them with whatever your team thinks in.

The supplier profile

The profile is laid out in two columns:

The activity counts are the killer feature. When a procurement manager asks "how often have we raised NCRs against this vendor in the last year?" it's one click — no spreadsheet, no manual tag-and-search.

Scorecard-style review on linked records

The NCRs, MOCs, and Audits tabs each carry an Actions column showing the open / closed corrective-action counts for that record. So you don't have to drill into every NCR to see whether anything is still outstanding — you scan the column, spot the rows with open actions, and triage from the supplier profile. Actions never link directly to a supplier; they always flow through a parent record (NCR / MOC / audit / meeting), and this column rolls them up to the supplier so they're visible without leaving the profile.

Facility ↔ whole-organization scope toggle

Most of the profile is scoped to your active facility by default — the linked NCRs, MOCs, audits, and documents are filtered to that site. A scope toggle in the header (sitting to the left of the Mark inactive button) flips between this facility and whole organization so you can widen the view to see the supplier's activity across every site at once.

Cross-module linking

Every record-creating module that might involve a vendor has an optional Supplier picker on the create form:

The picker is always optional — you don't have to attach a supplier — but when you do, the link is bidirectional: the supplier profile shows the record, and the record shows the supplier.

Product-driven supplier narrowing on create

When you're creating an NCR, MOC, FMEA, Exemption, Risk, or Meeting and you pick one or more products first, the Supplier picker on the same form narrows to those products' suppliers — including the suppliers attached to every component in their BOM, full depth. When the narrowed list collapses to a single supplier, the form auto-selects it. Picking a supplier first works in the reverse direction — the product list narrows to that supplier's products. Each picker carries a Show all escape so you can step outside the narrowed set if you genuinely need to. On documents, the Linked Supplier picker in the detail sidebar follows the same narrowing rules and is editable in place.

The Documents tab

The supplier profile has a dedicated Documents tab listing every controlled document linked to that supplier — internal and external alike. Two buttons at the top create a fresh document pre-linked to this supplier:

• New Internal Document — opens the standard new-document form with Linked supplier pre-filled.
• New External Document — same idea, but for the external-document form.

Either path drops you back on the supplier's Documents tab once the new doc lands, with the link already in place.

The supplier audit type

Alongside Internal first-party and Internal self, audits have a Supplier type. Picking it surfaces the Supplier picker as a required field — searchable, sourced from the directory you maintain here. The old free-text supplier-name box is gone, so every supplier audit ties back to a real directory record. Findings raised from a supplier audit pre-fill the source as Supplier audit on any resulting NCR.

See Audits → Supplier audits for how the rest of the audit flow handles supplier scope.

Status

Suppliers carry a status field with four values:

Inactive and Blocked records still appear in the directory and on past records they're linked to — nothing is hidden. The list page filters default to Active, but switching the filter shows everything.

Finding a supplier in the directory

The directory has a filter for every column right in the table header — search by supplier name, narrow by category, facility, status, or contact name, all at once. A count of matching suppliers sits in a footer strip below the table, so you always know how big the set you're looking at is.

Permissions

These are configured per-role at Admin → Roles & permissions — see Roles & permissions for the broader model.

Admin

Admin lives at Admin → Suppliers and covers:

• Categories — add, rename, reorder, delete.
• Number prefix — default SUP. Affects only new numbers issued after the change.

Deactivating a supplier — not trash

Suppliers don't go to the Trash bin the way other regulated records do. Their toggle is Active / Inactive.

Flip a supplier to Inactive when you stop doing business with them. The record:

• Stays on the Suppliers list with an Inactive badge.
• Drops out of new picker dropdowns (NCR source-supplier, MOC linked supplier, etc.).
• Keeps every existing cross-module link intact — past NCRs against the supplier still resolve correctly.
• Can be reactivated by flipping the toggle from the detail page.

The terminology overlap with deletion is historical — the user-facing concept is "inactive since," not "in trash." If you can't find a supplier in /trash, that's expected; check the Suppliers list with Show inactive turned on.

Related

• Clients — the sister module for customers
• Audits — supplier audit type
• Non-conformances — supplier-source NCRs
• Roles & permissions