Solutions
Supplier management, in the order it actually happens.
Six things a supplier programme has to do. What each one means when a real supplier is on the other end, and how we do it. No feature list.
Bring a supplier in
The job: get a new supplier from a request in someone’s inbox to an approved record, without approving anyone on a promise.
A request is raised internally and routed for approval before anyone contacts the supplier. The supplier is then invited by email and fills in their own record, which means the data arrives typed by the person who actually knows it. You decide what evidence has to be present before approval is possible, so a supplier cannot be approved with a missing certificate just because someone was in a hurry.
Where to go next
Know who they actually are
The job: answer a question about a plant or a part, not just about a company.
A supplier is not one flat row. It is a legal entity you pay, the sites where things are made, and the parts that come from each site. Documents attach at the level they belong to. A company certificate sits on the company, an IATF certificate on the site that holds it, a mill certificate on the batch it describes. Certificates carry their expiry date, so the ones about to lapse surface before a customer finds them.
Where to go next
Measure them, on a cadence
The job: turn opinions held in four departments into one score the supplier can be shown.
You set criteria and weightings per segment, so a strategic supplier is not scored like a stationery vendor. Several colleagues score the same supplier independently, and where they disagree stays visible instead of being averaged away, because the disagreement is usually the useful part. Set the cadence once and every due date, reminder and close date is calculated forward from it. Nobody re-sends anything.
Where to go next
Do something about what you find
The job: make sure a bad score produces a change rather than a line in the minutes.
A finding becomes an action with a named owner and a due date, attached to the score that caused it, so next quarter you can see whether the thing you raised actually moved. Business reviews run off the same record rather than off a deck someone rebuilt the night before, which is the difference between a review the supplier prepares for and one they sit through.
Where to go next
Carry the risk and the regulation
The job: satisfy several regimes without asking the same supplier the same question four times.
EUDR wants a plot of land. CBAM wants the installation. CSRD will accept a country. Ask for the country and you have answered the loosest question and nothing else. Collect at the finest grain once and the coarser answers fall out of it. One supplier record then serves risk, compliance and ESG reporting, and the supplier notices that the second request is shorter than the first.
Where to go next
Be able to prove it later
The job: answer an auditor asking what you knew in March, not what you know today.
Who asked, who answered, when, what evidence was attached and what changed since. Assembled as the work happens, which costs almost nothing, rather than reconstructed under audit, which does not. History is added to rather than overwritten, so a supplier moving production between plants leaves a record instead of erasing one.
Where to go next
Two things that run across all six
Segmentation
None of the above should apply equally to every supplier. Segments decide who gets scored quarterly and who gets scored at all, and the regulations now say much the same thing: ask less of small partners, concentrate depth where the impact is.
Eva AI
Eva reads what suppliers send back and checks it against what they committed to, then flags the gaps. It proposes, you approve. Nothing reaches a supplier because software decided it should.
Start with one supplier
The fastest way to know whether this fits is to run one real supplier through a full cycle, on your own criteria. Tell us about your supply base and we will come back within a working day.