Performing SPR (QMS)

QualityOne Vaults support the management of the Supplier Periodic Review (SPR) process, enabling you to regularly perform evaluations to monitor the performance of a supplier’s services, including quality of products, delivery times, and key performance indicators. You can manage the SPR process from start to finish in Vault using data from other QMS objects and actions to generate documents from various artifacts, verify data, and collate information. The output of this process is a final SPR report that compiles data from multiple sources.

SPR is part of the Periodic Reviews offering that provides shared functionality to enable users to perform different types of periodic reviews in Vault. See Periodic Reviews Overview for more details.

Depending on your Admin’s configuration, object, field, and section labels may appear differently than the labels mentioned in this article.

How the SPR Process Works

The SPR process begins when you create an SPR from a Periodic Review Template. Vault transfers data to that record based on the configuration of the template you select, and creates SPR Items from the template.

The SPR process typically includes gathering and analyzing data (for instance, supplier checklists, SCARs, and complaints) in documents linked to SPR Items related to the SPR record. You can use the object actions such as Generate Document from Report, Update SPR Fields, and Generate SPR Binder available on the SPR record to facilitate data collection and create related documents and binders.

Once you have collected all necessary documents and ensured your data is current, you can use the Generate Merged PDF Document action to create the final SPR report as a merged PDF document. The Final Report PDF contains all supporting documents in the SPR.

SPR Process Overview

The general process of working with SPR involves the following steps:

  1. Create a Periodic Review Template
  2. Create an SPR record
  3. Enter information about the Organization and Risk Matrix in the SPR record and update auto-populated data as needed
  4. Add or generate documents from SPR Items
  5. Generate an SPR binder
  6. Generate an SPR merged PDF document

Creating Periodic Review Templates for SPRs

To create a Periodic Review Template for use in a typical SPR process:

  1. Navigate to Business Admin > Periodic Review Templates or to a custom tab.
  2. Click Create.
  3. Select SPR as the Periodic Review Template Type.
  4. Optional: Enter any relevant details about facility, product, or location, as required by your organization.
  5. Click Save, or click Save + Create to create another template.
  6. In the Periodic Review Template Item section, click Create to make a related Periodic Review Template Item object for each expected item in your SPR process.
  7. Select the Periodic Review Template Item Type.
  8. Optional: Select a Document.
  9. Optional: Enter a Display Order. Vault orders any SPR Items in the order you specify here during SPR binder generation. Vault displays any documents that lack a Display Order value in alphabetical order after any documents with a defined display order.
  10. Click Save.

Creating SPRs

While you can create an SPR record manually, we recommend you use the following steps to create an SPR from a Periodic Review Template:

  1. Navigate to Business Admin > Periodic Review Templates.
  2. Open a Periodic Review Template record of the SPR object type.
  3. Select the Create Record From Template action from the All Actions menu.
  4. Edit the resulting SPR record to specify the organization and add relevant risk information to the appropriate text fields. Once you specify the Organization and Risk Matrix and save the record, information from these objects auto-populates into the Last Audit Date, Last Risk Classification, and Risk Level fields.

When you create SPRs using the Create Record from Template action, Vault creates an SPR record, gives it a system-managed record name, and transfers data and SPR Item related records from the template to the new record. If you create an SPR record manually, you must also add related SPR Items manually.

Updating SPR Data

Entering values for the Organization and Risk Matrix fields into an SPR record triggers fields on the SPR to auto-populate with information from the Organization and Risk Matrix objects.

You can run the Update SPR Fields user action on an SPR to ensure the auto-populated information is current. This action checks values in the Last Audit Date, Last Risk Classification, and Risk Level fields against those values in the Organization record and updates the SPR to reconcile any discrepancies. Depending on your Admin’s configuration, you can run this action at any point in the SPR data collection process before the Next Audit Date field is populated.

Generating SPR Documents

SPR processes typically include gathering data into documents for inclusion in the final report. These may be existing Vault documents, supplier audit checklists, formatted outputs, documents created from document templates, or documents created from reports.

Each SPR Item represents an artifact from which you can generate a document to include in the final report. When you generate documents from an SPR Item, Vault adds a link to the generated document to the Document field of the SPR Item, and a link to the SPR and SPR Item to their respective fields in the generated document.

Vault may automatically generate some documents when you create the SPR record from the template. Others, such as documents created from reports, can be created by performing the appropriate action on the SPR Item record:

  1. Navigate to the appropriate SPR object record details page.
  2. In the SPR Item section, select the required document generation action on the SPR Item record. For example, run the Generate Document from Report action to attach a PDF version of the report to the SPR Item record.

When you generate a document, Vault populates the document reference field on the SPR Item record with a link to the generated document.

Generating SPR Binders

After you have collected or created placeholders for all documents to complete the SPR process, you can create a binder to contain your related artifacts in your Vault library. Before performing this step of the SPR process, ensure there is an SPR Item for each required document.

To generate the SPR binder, run the Generate SPR Binder action on the SPR object record. When you perform this action on an SPR record, Vault creates a document binder containing all documents referenced by the SPR’s related SPR Items and assigns the same record label as the source SPR record. Vault orders SPR Item documents in the binder according to their Display Order field value.

Generating SPR Final Reports

After you have generated the SPR binder, a typical SPR process includes generating a final report. To generate a single PDF document containing all documents referenced by the SPR Items in the SPR record, run the Generate Merged PDF action on the SPR binder.

When you perform this action, Vault creates the combined PDF document as a Final Report document type and creates a link to the document from the associated SPR record. This link updates each time you run the Generate Merged PDF action. If the action is unsuccessful, Vault provides reasons for the failure, including on which specific document the error occurred.

Limitations

The following limitations apply to SPR functionality:

  • No more than 50 Periodic Review Template Items can be added per Periodic Review Template record.
  • Documents generated from the Generate Merged PDF Document user action cannot exceed 20,000 pages or 4GB.