SQP stands for Supplier Qualification Program, It is a technical audit program which was developed by surveying the requirement of global consumer product brands and retailers. It provides a standard that shows improvement by ensuring supplier’s production processes have the controls which are required to mitigate risk. It also helps to measure supplier performance and at the same time facilitating continuous improvement in managing product quality and safety. Many American and UK based customers are demanding this certification from their suppliers. Effective measures for supplier’s production processes and quality safety evaluation being demanded by the brands and international buyers, they demand more effective way of evaluations. Proactive ways are being discovered by the factories to benchmark themselves and track progress against competitors and national standards. Significant shift has been observed towards greater transparency and the implementation tool for assessing continuous improvement.

By implementing SQP standard organization can improve and control its overall production processes risk and quality safety conditions to assure the confidence & satisfaction of their customers and other stakeholders. Factory can get the certificate after successful certification audit but it is the score based certification and certificate is issued if any factory meets the minimum score in audit which is required to get the certificate issued as well as customers has also set the acceptance score against the audit.

SQP is the voluntary certification program and is suitable for any organization i.e. large, medium and small considering improvement in its quality assurance practices and sustainability to meet the expectations of all stakeholders. SQP audit is performed against the requirements of SQP standard which assures safe, legal, ethical & secure manufacturing process.

If any supplier organization is certified on SQP, that certificate and audit report can be shared with multiple customers rather than having different audit conducted for each customer if the customer accept the overall percentage of audit result as SQP audit report reflect the percentage against each improvement area that make overall percentage.