Working with Supplier Notifications (QMS)

QualityOne Vaults have built-in tools to process, triage, and track supplier-initiated change notifications. When an external supplier informs your organization through email about changes to an existing ingredient or package, or any other change required per their supplier agreements, Vault can process the email and store its contents as an object record. You can optionally create and track related processes and action items from the notification and collaborate on these with external parties.

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

About Supplier Notification Automation

Vault uses an Email Processor and an Inbound Email Address configured by your Admin to automate the intake of supplier notifications. Using organization data from Person records, Vault populates the Supplier and Supplier Contact values on the resulting Supplier Notification records. Vault also populates email metadata such as Email Subject, Sender Email Address, and email attachments on the Supplier Notification records.

After processing a notification, Vault matches follow-up emails and joins those Email records to the Supplier Notification record as Supplier Notification - Emails. Vault adds any follow-up attachments to the Supplier Notification record. In this way, the Supplier Notification becomes a complete repository for emails related to a single notification, making it easier for you to review its impact.

Supplier Notification Process

While processes for supplier notifications differ across organizations, the example below takes advantage of the automation described in this article.

  1. Initial Setup: Your organization creates Organization and Person records in Vault for each potential supplier contact that may initiate a notification, and an Admin configures Vault to automate notification intake.
  2. Notification Initiation: A known supplier directly sends a supplier notification email to the designated inbound email address which uses the Supplier Notification Email Processor. Alternatively, the designated inbound email address can also be one of the recipients on an email. In both cases, Vault processes the email then creates and populates a Supplier Notification record with information from the email.
  3. Notification Follow-up: As you communicate with the supplier on the original email thread which includes the designated inbound email address as one of the recipients, Vault collects all messages and attachments in the same email thread in the Supplier Notification record.
  4. Impact Assessment: You evaluate the notification’s impact. You optionally create related records from the Supplier Notification to track any required Change Controls, NCRs, and Action Items, and collaborate on these with external parties.

About the Email Processor

When the Supplier Notification Email Processor runs, the email processor determines whether there is already an applicable Supplier Notification record by checking the Message-ID and References in the email’s header information.

If there is no existing applicable Supplier Notification record, Vault attempts to create a record and auto-populates the Supplier Contact and Supplier information by matching the sender’s email address with the Email on an existing Person record in Vault. If there is an existing applicable Supplier Notification record, Vault adds the messages and attachments to the existing record.

Viewing Supplier Notifications

You can view Supplier Notification records from a Supplier Notification object tab or Business Admin > Objects > Supplier Notifications. These records contain information about the email from which they originated:

Field Description
Email Sent Date A DateTime value.
Sender Email Address Plain text of the sender's email address.
Supplier Contact Links to the Person record with the sender's email address. If the email processor finds more than one (1) applicable Person record, Vault leaves this field blank.
Supplier Links to the Organization of the Person in the Supplier Contact field. The email processor populates this value only if the Organization record is active.
Email Subject Plain text of the email's subject line.
Email Body Text Plain text of the email's body.

Attachments Section

The Attachments section contains the original email file and any files attached to the original email or any follow-up emails, up to a limit of 50 files.

If configured by your Admin, run the Create Related Record action from the Supplier Notification record’s All Actions menu. This action creates related records such as Change Controls, NCRs, and Action Items.