Contractor Performance Scorecard

The scorecard is the aggregation layer of the contractor programme. It should contain almost no new observation and almost no new judgement of individual events, because both belong in the records it draws from.

Contractor evaluation is one of the few contractor duties that is explicitly periodic in the standards. Selection and induction are events; monitoring performance and re-evaluating on the strength of it is a cycle, and the cycle is what the clauses ask to see.

The duty to monitor contracted work rather than merely select it is stated most plainly in the management system standards and in process safety regulation. General OHS law reaches the same place through the host's non-transferable duty to people it does not employ.

Filling the scorecard takes twenty minutes. Assembling it properly takes the period, and the four judgements below decide whether what comes out is a measurement or a mood.

Scorecard findings are almost never about a missing form. They are about a form that exists, posts a comfortable number, and does not reconcile with the records the auditor pulls next.

A ready meals site used a contract cleaning provider for nightly deep clean of the mixing and filling hall. The engineering buyer compiled the scorecard each quarter. It was consistently strong: ninety-one per cent, band Pass, overall rating Good, versus last period Same, approval status action No change. The reasoning was reasonable enough at the time, in that production had not complained, the crew were polite, and the areas looked clean at seven in the morning.

A metal detector rejection on a chilled line traced back to a fragment of a brush head. The traceability exercise pulled the previous six months of records for the cleaning contractor and found what the scorecards had not: nine post-work sanitation sign-offs marked Poor by the shift hygiene team, four findings on tool and part accountability, two occasions where the shift manager had stopped the crew and sent them off the line, and a pattern of the contractor's supervisor being absent after two in the morning. All of it was logged. None of it had reached a scorecard, because the scorecard was compiled by someone who was not on nights and who had never been shown the night records.

The scorecard was not falsified and the buyer was not careless by the standards of the process he was given. He was asked to score performance he had no way of observing, from a system that did not deliver the observations to him. The corrective action was to build the scorecard by query rather than by opinion, to require the completeness figure and the inspection count on the face of the record, and to route the night shift hygiene sign-offs into the contractor's file rather than the sanitation file.

The scorecard is a summary. What fails is the plumbing beneath it: the violation record that was raised against a job rather than a vendor, the night shift finding filed in a different folder, and the Fail band that never reached the approved list.

KnowContractor

Assembles the period scorecard from the vendor's own inspection, violation, incident and completion records, and carries the result band through to approved list status.

KnowSafe

Supplies the stop-work events, permit and isolation findings and audit scores that the safety performance section is supposed to be built from.

KnowQuality

Feeds hygiene sign-offs, tool accountability findings and contamination events into the food safety section, and raises the CAPA when the band demands one.

Ella

Flags the combinations that should not close: zero inspections with full compliance, a Fail band with no action, and an action required with no CAPA reference.

Score percent

The calculated performance figure for the period, where high is good, and where items marked not applicable leave the denominator rather than counting as passes.

Completeness percent

How much of the scorecard was actually answered, reported separately because a strong score on a partly answered form is not a strong score.

Result band

The Pass, Caution or Fail classification of the period, which should carry a defined and mandatory consequence for approval status.

Repeat violation

A breach of the same rule by the same contractor after it has already been recorded and communicated, which indicates a control failure rather than an individual lapse.

Work stopped by us

An occasion where the host halted the contractor's work on safety or hygiene grounds, and one of the few counts that cannot be explained away as paperwork.

Exposure denominator

The activity measure, work packages or worker days, against which counts are normalised so that busy and absent contractors can be compared.

Leading indicator

A measure of activity that precedes harm, such as reported near misses, inspection coverage or responsiveness to findings, as opposed to a count of harm already done.

Tool and part accountability

The discipline of accounting for every tool, fastener and component taken into a production area and removed from it, and the primary defence against contractor-caused foreign body contamination.