Meeting the ISO 9000 requirement for assessment of supplier capability

This paper examines the ISO 9001\2 requirement that the capability of a supplier to supplier product or service should be assessed. In practice the development of a preferred supplier list is driven by qualitative rather than quantitative factors of supplier capability. In the field of software considerable progress has been made towards developing models which when applied yield quantitative measures of supplier capability. The emerging ISO\IEC 15504 Standard for software process assessment is examined as a framework for application in application domains other than software. An automated tool, created in the Software Engineering Applications Laboratory to support ISO\IEC 15504 compliant software process assessments, is examined for suitability for application in process assessment in areas other than software.