A folder per supplier and a calendar of reminders
Every ingredient and packaging supplier has a folder: their certificate, their product specifications, the self-audit questionnaire, perhaps a letter of guarantee. Each document has a date. Some expire yearly, some when the supplier changes something, some when your own procedure says so.
Someone in the technical team keeps a spreadsheet of expiry dates and emails suppliers as they come up. Suppliers reply with the wrong document, or the same one as last year, or not at all. Audit season arrives and the spreadsheet is compared against the folders line by line.
Why the chase never ends
The documents belong to the supplier, but the job of keeping them current falls on you. Every supplier has a different contact, some change contacts often, and email requests are easy for them to ignore. Your own list of what each supplier must provide is in a procedure document, not a system.
- Expiry dates are typed into a spreadsheet by hand.
- Requests go to whoever was the contact last year.
- Returned documents are saved to folders with inconsistent names.
- Nobody can see at a glance which suppliers are incomplete.
- New raw materials from existing suppliers need their own specifications.
What the chasing costs
Technical staff time, mostly, spent on reminders and filing rather than on supplier performance or site work. Before audits, a scramble. And some risk that an approved supplier is being used on the strength of a document that quietly lapsed, which your team would rather know about than discover.
What your supplier approval process requires is set by your team and your certification scheme. We do not advise on it. We make the paperwork part less manual.
The supplier document tracker we build
- Your technical team defines the document types each supplier or material type must provide, and how long each is valid under your own procedure.
- Each supplier gets a secure portal link where their contact can upload documents and update details, without needing an account in your systems.
- When a document approaches expiry, the tracker emails the supplier with the link, and follows up on a schedule you set.
- Uploaded documents land in a review queue. An AI step can read the document and pre-fill dates and certificate details for your team to confirm, but a person accepts or rejects each one.
- A dashboard shows each supplier's status: complete, due soon, overdue or awaiting review, with the ability to filter by material or site.
- Everything accepted is stored with a history, so previous versions remain available.
| Status | What happens |
|---|---|
| Due soon | Supplier emailed a renewal link |
| Uploaded | Queued for your team to review |
| Accepted | Stored, expiry reset |
| Overdue | Flagged to technical and purchasing |
Less chasing, clearer status
Reminders go out on their own, to a link that is easy for the supplier to use. Your team reviews documents rather than hunting for them. Purchasing can see a supplier's status before placing an order with a new material. Audit preparation becomes filtering a dashboard.
When a supplier's contact changes, the new person updates the details through the same link, so requests stop disappearing into an old mailbox. And when purchasing wants to add a new raw material from an existing supplier during a shortage, the tracker shows straight away which documents are still needed for it, rather than that surfacing in a conversation with technical after the first delivery.
Does this sound like your technical office?
- Supplier expiry dates live in a spreadsheet.
- Renewal requests are sent one email at a time.
- Suppliers send the wrong document or last year's version.
- Before an audit, folders are checked against the list by hand.
- Purchasing cannot see a supplier's document status.