How to Chase Supplier Corrective Action Requests from Goods Inwards

Why requests stall at goods inwards

Most corrective action requests do not fail because the supplier refuses to answer. They fail because the request sits in an inbox, a spreadsheet tab or a receiving clerk's notebook, and no one is tracking the due date. The receiving team sees the bad pallet on Monday. The buyer hears about it on Wednesday. The request goes out on Friday with no response date, and by the next delivery nobody remembers that it was ever sent.

Goods inwards is the right place to start because that is where the evidence exists. A receiving check compares the goods with the delivery note and the purchase order, and it is where a short count, a damaged carton or a wrong lot is first seen. If the record of that check is thin, the supplier has nothing specific to investigate, and the reply comes back as a general apology. A useful request names the item, the lot, the quantity affected, the photos and the requirement that was not met.

A supplier corrective action request, often shortened to SCAR, is a formal way to ask a supplier to fix a problem and prevent it from coming back. It is not a phone call asking someone to look into it. It sets out the problem, the impact, the response that is needed and the date by which it is needed. Several quality guides describe the same core structure: a unique reference, supplier and product details, a clear description, supporting evidence, and response deadlines.

What the delay costs

The direct cost of a bad batch is the easy part to see: the scrap, the returned pallet, the freight both ways. The larger cost usually sits in the days a batch stays on hold. Stock is tied up. A production line waits for parts that cannot be used. Someone expedites a replacement at a premium. Someone else spends a morning on phone calls and re-checks.

The American Society for Quality, cited in a 2023 cost of quality guide published by Rework, puts quality-related costs at 5 to 25 percent of annual sales revenue for many organisations. A 2026 industry article, citing the same society, puts the range at 15 to 20 percent of sales for many manufacturers. The two ranges are not identical, and both describe whole quality programmes rather than supplier chasing alone, so this page does not add them together or apply them to your business.

We did not find a published range for the cost of one overdue supplier request, so this guide does not give one. A better method is to measure your own figures. For each open request, record the batch value on hold, the number of days it stays open, any line stoppage or expedited freight, and the staff hours spent chasing. Multiply the daily holding cost by the days a typical request stays open. That number is more useful to a business owner than any industry average, and it is the figure a free automation audit would measure.

The manual way and the automated way

The table below compares how the same task usually runs by hand and how it runs when the steps are connected. The difference is less about the tools and more about who checks the date, and when.

The automated column does not remove judgement. It removes the forgetting. A person still decides whether a reply is adequate, whether the root cause makes sense and whether the supplier's change has worked.

How to automate it, step by step

1. Standardise the receiving record first. Before any software is connected, agree the fields a receiver must fill in for a non-conformance: supplier, purchase order, delivery note number, item code, lot or batch, quantity received, quantity rejected, the requirement that was not met, and at least two photos. A shared form in Microsoft Forms or Google Forms works for a small team. A barcode or lot scan works better where the warehouse already uses one.

2. Hold the affected stock in the system. If your ERP or inventory tool can mark a lot as on hold, connect the form to that status. Common options include SAP, Oracle NetSuite, Odoo, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Zoho Inventory and, in India, Tally. Check whether your tool supports a hold status before you build anything around it. If it does not, keep a hold flag in the register and make it visible to the buyer.

3. Generate the numbered request from the record. A workflow tool such as Zapier, Make or Microsoft Power Automate can take a submitted form and create a request in a register, usually a Google Sheet, an Excel table on SharePoint, or a database. The request gets a reference number, the supplier's contact details, the evidence links and the deadline. The email text is filled from the record, so the buyer does not retype it.

4. Read scanned paperwork where it matters. Some suppliers send a certificate of analysis, a packing list or a signed delivery note as a PDF or a photo. Optical character recognition (OCR) services such as Google Cloud Document AI or Microsoft Azure AI Document Intelligence can pull out the lot number and quantity so they can be matched against the purchase order. Someone should still check any field the system could not read clearly. A misread lot number can send the request to the wrong batch.

5. Send through the channel the supplier uses. Email is the default, and it creates a record that auditors and customers understand. For suppliers who already work on WhatsApp, the WhatsApp Business Platform can send messages through the Cloud API. Businesses can send a message outside the 24-hour customer service window only as a pre-approved template. Meta groups templates into categories, and a utility template is designed for follow-ups on a specific transaction. A reply to a corrective action request will usually fit that category, but the template must be approved before it is used, and the wording is limited.

6. Use a language model for drafting and sorting, not for deciding. A large language model can draft the reminder wording, summarise a long supplier reply into the points that need checking, and sort replies into groups such as containment confirmed, root cause supplied, or evidence missing. It should not mark a request as effective or close it. Those decisions belong to the quality team, and the model's summary should always link to the original reply.

7. Build one register and one escalation path. Every open request should appear in one place, with its age, owner and next due date. Escalation should be written down: who is told when a reply is three days late, who is told when it is seven days late, and who decides whether to hold future shipments from that supplier. Those decisions are the quality team's.

A chase schedule that keeps requests moving

The schedule below is a starting point for the quality team to adjust. The day counts are not industry standards, and they should match how quickly your suppliers and your production line can respond.

• Day 0: the request is issued with a reference number, evidence attached and deadlines stated.
• Day 1 or 2: the supplier must confirm receipt. If there is no confirmation, a reminder goes out and the buyer is flagged.
• Before the containment deadline: a reminder goes out one working day before it falls due.
• On the containment deadline: a second message goes out, and the buyer is told whether the batch is still on hold.
• Shortly after a missed deadline: a person calls the supplier's quality contact. The register records the call.
• Before the root cause deadline: the supplier's analysis is checked for a stated cause, not a general statement.
• On the corrective action deadline: the supplier must send evidence that the change was made, such as a revised work instruction or a record of operator training.
• After the change: the quality team checks whether later deliveries from that supplier show the same problem, before the request is closed.

Closing a request is a decision, not a click. Evidence should be attached to the request, and the person who signs off should be named in the record. A request that closes without evidence is one of the most common reasons the same problem returns three months later.

What breaks, and how to prevent it

The first thing that breaks is the receiving form. If receivers fill it in differently, or skip photos because the dock is busy, the automation will send requests that the supplier cannot act on. Test the form with two or three receivers on real deliveries before you rely on it. Keep the required fields short.

The second thing that breaks is the supplier contact list. Emails bounce, buyers leave, and a request sent to a former contact looks like silence. Check the contact details at every new supplier record, and make the register show the last date a reply was received from each supplier.

The third risk is wrong matching. OCR and automatic matching can read a lot number as a similar number from another batch. Keep a person in the loop for any match that affects stock on hold, and log which matches were checked by a person.

The fourth risk is over-chasing. A supplier who receives five automatic messages a day will ignore all of them. Limit reminders to the schedule above, and send each one to the named contact only. If a supplier is genuinely unresponsive, that is a supplier decision for the quality and buying teams, not a message-count problem.

The fifth risk is a data-sharing problem. Photos of product, lot records and supplier contact details may be personal or commercially sensitive. Check who can see the register and where the files are stored before you connect any third-party tool.

Automation also cannot do the hardest part. It cannot tell whether a root cause is real, whether a corrective action is proportionate, or whether a supplier's fix has held. Those judgements stay with the quality team, and the system should be built so they are always visible.

When not to automate

Automation is not worth building for every problem. If you receive a few deliveries a month and a supplier problem comes up once or twice a year, a shared template, a dated calendar reminder and a single register sheet will usually be enough. A custom workflow that takes weeks to build and needs a specialist to maintain will cost more in time than the chasing it replaces.

Do not automate a process that is not yet agreed. If the quality team has not decided what counts as a non-conformance, or who approves a hold release, the software will only make the confusion faster. Write the rules down first.

Do not automate sending to suppliers who have not agreed to receive requests through that channel. In some relationships, a formal letter, a phone call or a meeting is the right step, and the register should record it as such.

Finally, do not use automation to hide a supplier problem from the people who need to know. A dashboard that shows green because reminders were sent is worse than a messy spreadsheet that shows an overdue request in red.

What it typically takes

For a small team with one receiving point and a few suppliers, the main effort is agreeing the form, the register and the schedule. That usually takes a few working days of meetings and testing with real deliveries. Connecting the form to a register and an email template is often a matter of days for someone comfortable with spreadsheets and a workflow tool. A WhatsApp channel adds the time needed to write templates and wait for approval, and it is worth doing only where suppliers already use WhatsApp for business.

A larger operation with an ERP, several sites and many suppliers will need more time. The hold status, the supplier master data, the approval rules and the reporting all need to match across sites. Expect a pilot on one site or one supplier group first, then a wider rollout after the team has checked several full cycles, including at least one closed request with evidence.

The time that matters most after launch is the weekly review. Someone should look at the register, check for overdue requests, and confirm that closed requests have evidence. That review takes less time than the chasing it replaces, but it does not disappear.