Customer and contract quality

Open: Operations > Customer & Contract Quality. Typical preparers: Quality Manager, Engineer, or Purchasing. Decision: Quality Manager or administrator.

Maintain customers

Create a customer with a name, optional reference, and notes. The register supplies a CUST reference. It is a lean quality customer list; use your existing commercial system for quoting, revenue, and order administration.

Review an order or contract

1. Open the customer and create a contract review with the order reference and product or service description.
2. Address all four requirement categories shown below. Use text or the explicit Not applicable control, as justified by the actual order.
3. Confirm capability to meet the requirements using the form's capability control.
4. Save the complete draft form. Review the checklist before asking for a decision.
5. The authorized decision-maker accepts or declines the review through the available control.
6. Confirm the decision and its attribution on the CR record before communicating acceptance through your order process.

Requirement category	What to address
Customer specified	Product, drawing revision, delivery, post-delivery, documentation, packaging, and other specified expectations
Necessary but unstated	Requirements needed for the specified or intended use that were not stated directly
Statutory and regulatory	Applicable obligations identified by your organization
Organization specified	Internal requirements your shop determines necessary

Blank is not the same as Not applicable. The decision gate requires all four categories addressed and capability confirmed. A filled form does not prove that the technical review was adequate; include the references and unresolved issues a reviewer needs.

Amend a decided review

Use the amendment form on the same review for later changes. Describe the changed requirement, its assessment, and the decision. Where the form offers a decline-now decision, it changes the review's disposition as part of the recorded amendment. Earlier decisions remain on the chain.

Example: the customer changes the drawing from Rev B to Rev C after order acceptance. Record the revised requirement and capability assessment, then use Change Control and configuration or inspection-plan updates where needed. Typing the new revision into an unrelated note does not update every linked operating record.

Customer property

Customer property is anything a customer lends you to do their job: material, tooling, gauges, documents, drawings, or data such as a CAD model. ISO 9001 asks you to identify it, look after it while you have it, and tell the customer if it is lost or damaged. Norma keeps it in Operations > Customer & Contract Quality > Customer property register.

Log an item when it arrives. Pick the customer (add them on the contract page first if they aren't there), the kind, a description and, if it has one, the part, heat, lot or serial number. Add the quantity and unit if you count it, the date you received it, what condition it was in, how you checked it (packing list, certificate, photos) and where you keep it. Norma numbers the entry CP-0001, CP-0002 and so on.

When it leaves or is used up, open the entry and change its status to Returned, Consumed or Disposed. Every change needs a note: the return paperwork, the job it was used on, or the customer's written OK to scrap it. If a returned item comes back, set it to Held again with a note saying why.

If something goes wrong, open the entry and use Report a loss or damage. Choose what happened (lost, damaged, deteriorated, unsuitable on receipt, out of calibration, or yield loss beyond what the customer allows), the date you found it and the details. If you raised a nonconformance for it, pick it from the list. The report is numbered CPR-0001.

Tell the customer the same day. Until you record it, everyone who reviews contracts sees "Tell the customer: CPR-0001 (damaged)" in My Work. It is due the day the problem was found and overdue from the next day, by your organization's own date. Once you've told them, select Customer told on the report and record the date, who you spoke to and what they said. You can correct this while the report is open.

Close the report once it's resolved. Someone who reviews contracts writes what was done (replaced, repaired, used as is with the customer's agreement, scrapped with their authorization) and selects Close report. Norma won't close a report until the customer notification is recorded. A closed report can't be changed.

Each customer's page lists what they've lent you. The register downloads as a CSV, and each entry's record history shows every change, report and notification. To find an entry fast, type its CP number, its serial or lot number, the customer's reference or part of its description into search.

In the user guide

This article is chapter 16, "Customer and Contract Quality", of the NormaQMS User Guide (NORMA-UG-001), which is under Help > User guide. Chapter numbers in the text refer to that guide.