Customer audits are different from certification audits
A certification audit asks whether your quality system meets a standard. A customer audit asks whether you can reliably supply their parts, to their expectations, on their terms. Each automotive customer has its own supplier evaluation approach, its own vocabulary and its own scoring, and these requirements change over time.
That is why a supplier with a clean certificate can still be surprised. Often the cause is not that the plant is careless. It is that the evidence lives in different places, the people being interviewed have never been asked these questions, and problems that are well known on the floor have not made it into the system.
How we help you prepare
- Get the current requirements. We work from the customer documents you are entitled to have, such as your supplier quality manual and customer-specific requirements, and check you are using the current version.
- Review your process against them. We walk the plant and compare what the requirement asks for with what actually happens, using your records and the people who do the work.
- Close the real gaps. We help you prioritize and fix them with corrective actions that hold, rather than preparing a polished presentation for audit day.
- Prepare your people. Operators, supervisors and process owners get coaching on explaining their own work and showing the evidence, honestly and without scripts.
- Follow up. We help you answer findings, verify effectiveness and keep the routines running after the audit.
Questions to answer first
- Which customer is auditing you, and what is the date and scope?
- Which version of the customer's requirements applies to you?
- What happened at the last evaluation, and which findings are still open?
- Who will be interviewed, and have they ever been asked to explain their process to an outside auditor?
- Where is the evidence stored, and can the right person find it quickly?
If you can answer these quickly, you are ahead of most. If not, that is where we start. Below is how we think about each of the four programs.
Nissan ASES
ASES is Nissan's supplier evaluation approach (Automotive-parts Supplier Evaluation Standard), used to assess whether a supplier's production site and systems are capable of delivering good parts. Evaluations look at the actual work site, such as how good and defective parts are identified and what prevents defects, and the result affects supplier status. We help you test your site against what an evaluator will look for and close the gaps with your team.
Honda MQSR
MQSR (Minimum Quality System Requirements) is described in Honda's Supplier Quality Manual and is part of how Honda checks a supplier's quality system. We help you understand how the requirements apply to your products and processes, review your controls and records, and prepare the people who will be asked to demonstrate them.
GM BIQS
BIQS (Built In Quality Supply) is General Motors' way of assessing a supplier's quality systems and process controls on the plant floor, with minimum performance expectations tied to GM's IATF 16949 customer-specific requirements. GM's terms and reporting have changed over the years, so work from the documents GM gives you today. We help you review your controls, problem-solving effectiveness and records against the current expectations.
Ford MSA
For Ford, MSA here means the Q1 Manufacturing Site Assessment, part of Ford's Q1 program (not to be confused with measurement systems analysis, which shares the abbreviation and is a separate topic). We help you review your site against what Ford expects, and support the process, problem-solving and measurement-system discipline the assessment looks for.
What shows up across customer audits
Requirements differ, but the same themes keep appearing: whether corrective actions actually fix the cause, whether control plans and work instructions match what operators do, how changes are managed, how people are trained, and how quickly a defective part is stopped. These are the same things we help plants fix every day. Tenneco in Athens, Alabama cut customer complaints from 25+ per month to under 5 with robust problem solving and a sharp focus on CAPA effectiveness.
Confidentiality and independence
Many customer evaluation documents are confidential. We do not publish or share them, and this page describes the programs only in general terms and in our own words. We cannot promise a score, level or rank, and no consultant honestly can. What we can do is help you find and close gaps before the customer does. CauseLogic is an independent consultancy and is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Nissan, Honda, General Motors or Ford. Program names are used only to identify the requirements our clients work to.