Grouped Requirements for Contacts

Contact 'Groups' are a way to specify sets of Requirements, which helps to standardise the requirements applied to similar contacts. Grouped requirements might be based on risk, on the type of contact, on what they supply, where they are located, or something else.

When you select a group for a contact, all of the requirements for the group apply to that contact. If you update the group, then the changes automatically apply to all of the linked Contacts.

To be "in compliance" the contact must have a current record in QSToolbox for each requirement from its linked group(s).

An example for a food manufacturer

A food manufacturing business has many suppliers who provide different ingredients for their products. Food safety risks are very different for dry ingredients compared to wet ingredients so the manufacturer has different controls for each, and this is reflected in different requirements for the suppliers.

The quality team could edit each supplier in QSToolbox and assign the requirements individually, but with a lot of contacts this is a bit tedious. It's also very likely that something would be missed.

To make this easier to manage, the quality manager creates groups of requirements for each type of ingredient supplier:

The quality team selects an appropriate requirements group for each ingredient supplier.

Select a Requirements Group for a Contact

Edit the contact and select a group (or groups) in the "Contact Groups" field:

In the "Requirements" field you can select additional requirements that apply only to this contact.

When you save the contact, QSToolbox looks for matching records and generates a report on compliance showing all of the group requirements and any additional ones:

Use the blue "+" button near the missing or expired record to easily add a new record for that requirement.

Create a New Contact Group

You will need to be in the "Staff" or "Contacts_managers" permission groups to be able to add or edit Contact Groups.

Go to the CONTACTS module and look for GROUPS, and click on the "+ ADD CONTACT GROUP" button at the top right:

Fill in the fields:

• Name - this is what users will see in the drop-down menu when adding or editing a contact, so make it short and descriptive enough to understand who it should apply to.
• Description - brief notes about this contact group, e.g., to describe what it should be used for or why it's needed. These notes only appear in the list of contact groups
• Requirements - select which requirements will apply to linked contacts.

Click [SAVE]