Tracking vendor COA reply times: 12 weeks, 37 suppliers, weird outliers

Sep 2 1645 views 10 posts

I’ve been logging public supplier COA pages and email auto-replies for 12 weeks—37 suppliers, 214 data points. Median first human reply is 5 days; 6 vendors never replied. HPLC purity on posted COAs ranges 92.1–99.4%, and three show mass spec values that don’t match the parent ion. Is this just poor documentation, or a reliable red flag? I’m not naming names, just trying to build a reliability score.

👍 1

5-day median matches what I see, but 6 no-replies out of 37 is brutal. Did you count weekends?

👍 2

Weekends count. Ghosting after 10 days is the signal.

I count weekends too, and day 10 is my cutoff. Started noting auto-reply-to-human gaps in a spreadsheet; three vendors looked fine until I did that. Ghosting is the loudest column now.

👍 1

Six of thirty-seven stings. Four of twenty-nine went quiet, but two of those came back after two weeks with a generic template. Those get their own bucket in the log: late human, not ghost.

Mass spec mismatches I treat as a yellow flag, not a red one. One of my logged pages had the wrong adduct listed; another was a typo in the parent ion. Still, three in a row would make me pause.

For a reliability score, I'd weight reply time and COA completeness first, ion match second, purity third. A 99% number means little if nobody answers an email. My current sheet is just columns and gut notes.

Ten days is my cutoff too. Weekends count.

👍 1

92.1% on HPLC made me raise an eyebrow, but method and integration can explain a lot. I note it, then wait for the mass spec. Silence still outranks a low purity number in my book.

I ran a 9-week version of this with 18 suppliers, and my weird outlier was the opposite: a 2-hour human reply with a COA dated 14 months earlier and a lot number that didn’t match anything on their site, while the slowest one (8 days) sent a corrected batch-specific PDF after I asked about the mass spec. Tht flipped my scoring—I

👍 1