IR Category: Manufacturer Support and QMS

Foreword. IR Category Standard for manufacturer support and QMS — the counterparty signal of the Intrinsic Rating (category weights live in the VRS-GEN-005 master and its data twin, never here). This is the ONLY place manufacturer quality enters the VRS; there is no standalone Manufacturer Rating (canonical rule, 2026-08-26). This edition scores the category as a sum of integer points across seven criteria (MS-1…MS-7, 39 points; Clause 6), each earned against a plain-language ladder and bounded by an evidence tier — Unverified, Verified or Certified (Clause 7). It supersedes the rate-based model of the 0.x drafts: no wrongful-denial-rate formula, no statistical blend, no qualitative bands. Requirements use “shall”.

Introduction

Two robots with identical field records are not equal collateral if one maker honours its warranties and runs an audited quality system while the other disputes valid claims and lets a known fault sit in the fleet. This category measures the manufacturer as a counterparty: its demonstrated willingness and system to stand behind the model. That is a loss driver in its own right — a maker that pays claims lowers the net severity of a repair loss (recoverability); an audited quality-management system lowers the chance of a fleet-wide latent defect (correlated frequency); prompt, closed field actions contain a systematic hazard before it becomes a catastrophe; and a maker that stays solvent and keeps its support commitments through a change of control protects the collateral over the life of a loan (going concern). This Standard turns “will this maker stand behind the model?” into a repeatable number by asking seven questions — is there a certified quality system whose scope covers the model, what is the company’s track record, are warranty claims honoured, are field issues addressed and closed, are the maker’s disclosures complete and consistent, is operator training provided, and has ownership or solvency continuity held — and awarding integer points for each. The points sum to a category total of 0–39. What a robot can earn is bounded by how well its evidence is substantiated: public documents alone reach the Unverified ceiling, a manufacturer evidence pack reaches the Verified ceiling, and a witnessed demonstration reaches the Certified ceiling. The category reuses evidence a maker already produces — a quality-management certificate on a public register, warranty-claim records handled to a recognised complaints process, public recall and field-action databases, and public financial and court filings — so adoption is a mapping, not new testing.

1 Scope

1.1 This Standard defines, for the manufacturer-support-and-QMS intrinsic category: what the category measures (Clause 4); the scoring basis (Clause 5); the seven criteria MS-1…MS-7 with their point ladders and tier ceilings (Clause 6); the evidence admissible at each tier (Clause 7); the determination procedure (Clause 8); a worked example (Clause 9); and the assessor checklist (Clause 10).

1.2 The category shall be assessed at one of three tiers — Unverified, Verified, Certified — and each criterion states the maximum points reachable at each tier. The category tier is the tier whose evidence bar the assessed evidence meets (Clause 8). An Application Rating tier shall not exceed the Intrinsic Rating tier.

1.3 This Standard excludes category weighting and aggregation into the Intrinsic Rating (VRS-GEN-005 §6), sector re-weighting (the sector -201 protocols), and the evidence-grade definitions (VRS-GEN-012). It also excludes repair speed and parts logistics, measured by serviceability (VRS-GEN-103), and end-of-support horizon, obsolescence and residual value, measured by economics (VRS-GEN-107); this category measures manufacturer behaviour and system as counterparty, not those outcomes, and shall not re-score them. It does not itself assign the Intrinsic Rating.

2 Normative references

• VRS-GEN-001, Vocabulary and Terminology — robot and quality-management terms.
• VRS-GEN-005, Intrinsic Rating — Methodology — point aggregation, tiers, cold-start parity and the company-wide fallback rule (§6).
• VRS-GEN-009, Robot Risk Passport and Registry Schema — the record that carries the category result (Clause 8).
• VRS-GEN-012, Evidence Grades and Data Requirements — evidence kinds and the tier evidence bars.
• ISO 9001:2015, Quality management systems — Requirements — the generic QMS baseline (edition in force at assessment; the 6th edition ISO 9001:2026 becomes the anchor once effective 2026-09-16).
• ISO 13485:2016, Medical devices — Quality management systems — Requirements for regulatory purposes — product-QMS artefact for medical-class models.
• IATF 16949:2016, Quality management system requirements for automotive production (supplements ISO 9001:2015) — reused product-QMS artefact.
• SAE AS9100D:2016, Quality Management Systems — Requirements for Aviation, Space and Defense Organizations — reused product-QMS artefact.
• ISO 10002:2018, Quality management — Customer satisfaction — Guidelines for complaints handling in organizations — the warranty/support-claim handling process basis.
• Regional statutory legal-guarantee anchors (appear only as anchors, never as requirements): Directive (EU) 2019/771 (sale of goods, applies from 2022; amended by Directive (EU) 2024/1799); Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act (1975), 15 U.S.C. §2301 (US).

3 Terms and definitions

Terms per VRS-GEN-001 and ISO 9000:2015 (quality-management vocabulary). Locally:

• QMS scope — the products and processes a quality-management certificate covers; a certificate whose scope names the model’s design and production is stronger evidence than one whose scope is partial or unrelated (MS-1).
• eligible claim — a warranty or support claim within the declared warranty terms and the statutory legal-guarantee floor of the jurisdiction of sale (EU 2019/771 / Magnuson-Moss); out-of-warranty and documented-misuse denials are not wrongful and are excluded (MS-3).
• field action — a manufacturer-initiated or regulator-ordered corrective action on a fielded model (service bulletin with a safety or functional effect, firmware fix, recall), and its closure status (MS-4).
• change of control — a merger, acquisition, insolvency event or restructuring that alters the manufacturer of record, and whether the maker’s support commitments survived it (MS-7).
• tier — the evidence stringency at which the category is assessed: Unverified (public evidence only), Verified (manufacturer evidence pack examined), Certified (behaviour witnessed).
• ceiling — the maximum points a criterion can award at a given tier; points earned are capped at the ceiling of the assessed tier.
• evidence bar — the minimum evidence a criterion requires before any points are awarded; below it the criterion scores 0.
• company-wide fallback — where model-specific evidence is unavailable, the substitute points a criterion allows from manufacturer-wide evidence (VRS-GEN-005 §6); marked in the criterion row.
• certificate rung — a ladder step earned by a publicly verifiable third-party certificate on a registrar’s public register (a QMS certificate number and scope statement) in lieu of a witnessed demonstration.

4 What this category measures

4.1 The category measures the manufacturer’s demonstrated willingness and system to stand behind the model — the counterparty signal — across seven observable behaviours: maintaining a certified quality system whose scope covers the model (MS-1), a company track record (MS-2), honouring warranty and support claims (MS-3), addressing and closing field issues (MS-4), disclosing completely and consistently (MS-5), providing operator and maintenance training (MS-6), and preserving support through solvency and ownership continuity (MS-7).

4.2 It measures manufacturer behaviour and system, not product outcomes. Repair speed and parts logistics are measured by serviceability (VRS-GEN-103); end-of-support horizon, obsolescence and residual value by economics (VRS-GEN-107); this category shall not re-score them.

4.3 The category shall be assessed at model granularity (manufacturer + model + declared major variant); several criteria are properties of the company by nature (MS-1, MS-2, MS-7) and are read at the manufacturer of record. Warranty and field-action records shall not be pooled across variants unless the manufacturer declares them one model for support purposes and evidence supports that declaration.

4.4 There is no standalone Manufacturer Rating (canonical rule, 2026-08-26); manufacturer quality enters the Intrinsic Rating only through this category’s points.

5 Scoring basis

5.1 The category score shall be the sum of integer points awarded across the seven criteria MS-1…MS-7 (Clause 6). The maximum is 39 points. There is no rate formula and no statistical blend; the point range of each criterion sizes its importance. Aggregation of this total into the Intrinsic Rating, tier rules and the cold-start parity and company-wide fallback rules are defined once in VRS-GEN-005 §6 and are not restated here.

5.2 Each criterion awards points against a ladder of rungs, highest first, decidable by inspection, measurement, test or documented evidence (VRS-GEN-002 §7.1). The assessor shall award the highest rung the evidence supports.

5.3 Each criterion states three ceilings — Unverified, Verified, Certified. Points earned shall be capped at the ceiling of the tier at which the criterion’s evidence is assessed. A criterion may reach a higher tier than another; the category tier is recorded per Clause 8.

5.4 Each criterion states an evidence bar. Where the bar is not met the criterion scores 0; no evidence is 0 points, never a null or a discard.

5.5 A criterion marked not applicable by class for the model’s form (Clause 6 Applicability row) is excluded from the score and from the totals; the reachable maximum is reduced accordingly and recorded (Clause 8). For the manufacturer-support category all seven criteria apply to all classes.

5.6 Where a criterion offers a company-wide fallback, manufacturer-wide evidence may earn the stated fallback points when model-specific evidence is unavailable (VRS-GEN-005 §6); the substitution shall be recorded. Numeric thresholds inside a rung that carry (prior) are launch-edition values that change only through the calibration data twin, never in this document.

6 Criteria

6.0 Summary. Points and tier ceilings per criterion; totals reproduce by addition.

6.1 MS-1 Quality management system (0–8)

6.2 MS-2 Company track record (0–3)

6.3 MS-3 Warranty honouring (0–8)

6.4 MS-4 Field support conduct (non-safety) (0–6)

6.5 MS-5 Disclosure conduct (0–5)

6.6 MS-6 Training and operator-competence provision (0–5)

6.7 MS-7 Going concern and ownership continuity (0–4)

7 Evidence by tier

7.1 Unverified. The assessor works only from evidence anyone can obtain without the manufacturer’s cooperation: public quality-certificate registers (the registrar’s entry with a certificate number and scope, MS-1), public company filings and press (track record, MS-2), operator and press reports of how claims are handled (warranty honouring, MS-3), published service bulletins and advisories (field support, MS-4), the consistency of public disclosures — datasheet, manual and published claims read against one another (disclosure, MS-5), publicly available training materials (MS-6), and court filings, regulatory filings and financial press (going concern, MS-7). Each criterion’s Unverified ceiling is the most an honest reading of such evidence can earn; the category tier is Unverified.

7.2 Verified. The assessor additionally examines a manufacturer evidence pack: the QMS certificate with its scope statement, an attested company profile, the warranty claims record, the bulletin and corrective-action register with closure status, the information pack itself with its attestation, the training package, and the attested disclosure of any change-of-control event. Verified ceilings apply only to criteria whose pack items are present and examined; the category tier is Verified.

7.3 Certified. For this category the Certified tier adds one witnessed check — the consistency of the information pack against the demonstrated model (MS-5) — while the documentary and record criteria (MS-1, MS-2, MS-3, MS-4, MS-6, MS-7) carry their Certified points from the Verified evidence, because counterparty conduct is established by record rather than by a single witnessed act. The category tier is Certified.

7.4 Certificate rung. Where a criterion is satisfied by a certificate (MS-1), a publicly verifiable third-party QMS certificate identified by registrar entry, certificate number and scope statement earns the stated rung without a witnessed demonstration; a lapsed or unverifiable certificate shall not, and a certificate whose scope does not name the model’s production earns only the partial-scope rung.

7.5 Going-concern evidence. For MS-7 the assessor reads solvency and ownership continuity from evidence that is public by nature — court and insolvency filings, regulatory and securities filings, and financial press — and, at Verified, from an attested company profile disclosing any change of control and whether support commitments survived it. An undisclosed event, or support withdrawn from existing models, scores 0; a disclosed event whose support commitments were published and demonstrably honoured scores the middle rung.

7.6 Company-wide fallback and parent-company evidence. Where a criterion offers a company-wide fallback (MS-3 → 6, MS-4 → 5) and model-specific evidence is unavailable, manufacturer-wide records — a company warranty claims record or a company bulletin/corrective-action register — earn the stated fallback points (VRS-GEN-005 §6); the substitution shall be recorded per Clause 8. MS-1, MS-2 and MS-7 are company-wide by nature and are read at the manufacturer of record. Parent-company evidence is admissible on the same basis where the manufacturer is a declared subsidiary and the parent’s support commitments extend to the model.

8 Determination procedure

Step 1 — Fix the tier and applicability. Record the tier at which each criterion is assessed (Clause 7) and, per 5.5, the set of any not-applicable criteria; for the manufacturer-support category all seven apply.

Step 2 — Award points. For each criterion, the assessor shall award the highest ladder rung the evidence supports (Clause 6) and shall cap the award at the ceiling of that criterion’s assessed tier (5.3). Where the evidence bar is not met, the award shall be 0 (5.4). Numeric rung thresholds marked (prior) are read as written; they are not recomputed here.

Step 3 — Record substitutions. Where a company-wide fallback is used (MS-3, MS-4), record the substitution and the fallback points (7.6); where a criterion is read at the manufacturer of record (MS-1, MS-2, MS-7) or on parent-company evidence, record that basis.

Step 4 — Sum. The category score shall be the sum of the capped per-criterion points. With no not-applicable criteria the reachable maximum is 39; otherwise it is 39 minus the ranges of the excluded criteria, and this reachable maximum shall be recorded alongside the score.

Step 5 — Record the tier reached. The category tier is the lowest tier among the criteria that determined the score (a score resting on any Unverified criterion is an Unverified-tier result).

Step 6 — Output and passport binding. Record, for the model’s Robot Risk Passport manufacturer-support-category record (VRS-GEN-009): the category score, the per-criterion points, the ceiling reached and tier for each criterion, the not-applicable set and reachable maximum, and the company-wide substitutions, so that an underwriter or lender can reproduce and audit the score from the passport alone. The per-criterion points carry three loss drivers: warranty honouring (MS-3) carries recoverability — the net severity of a repair or indemnity loss after the warranty offset, informing net-severity relativity and any deductible or coinsurance condition; the quality system and field support (MS-1, MS-4) carry correlated / latent-defect frequency — a portfolio-correlation signal and a recall-response covenant; and going concern (MS-7) carries counterparty continuity — the risk that support and warranty commitments do not survive an insolvency or change of control, informing a covenant or condition. These are underwriting and credit signals, not prices; rate-setting is the carrier’s act and risk classification the actuary’s (ASOP No. 12, Risk Classification). This category does not carry residual value, obsolescence or end-of-support horizon — the finance drivers of economics_residual (VRS-GEN-107) — nor repair speed and parts logistics — serviceability (VRS-GEN-103) — and shall not be read as either (4.2).

9 Worked example (fictional model)

“Cobalt Handling CB-4”, a warehouse AMR, class = industrial mobile-logistics, assessed at the Unverified tier: the assessor works only from public evidence, with no manufacturer pack and no witnessed demonstration. All seven criteria apply (reachable maximum at Unverified = 33).

The manufacturer-support total is 30 of a reachable 33 at the Unverified tier. Arithmetic: 8 + 2 + 5 + 5 + 3 + 3 + 4 = 30. Two effects are worth reading, both consequences of the Unverified tier. At MS-3 the public operator and press reports read as claims being honoured well above the top-rung threshold (rung 8), but the Unverified ceiling of 5 caps the award — the maker would have to open its warranty claims record at the Verified tier to earn the 8. At MS-4 the public service bulletins show proactive, closed corrective actions (rung 6), capped at the Unverified ceiling of 5 for the same reason; the corrective-action register at Verified would earn the 6. MS-2 earns 2 rather than 3 because the public filings show the eligibility bar met with margin but short of the ≥ 5,000-unit, multi-region top rung, and MS-6 earns 3 because only materials, not a structured programme, are publicly visible. No company-wide fallback was needed (model-specific public evidence was present for MS-3 and MS-4), and the not-applicable set is empty. Because the score rests on Unverified-tier evidence throughout, the category tier is Unverified (Step 5). The score, per-criterion points, and tier and ceiling reached for each criterion are recorded to the passport (Step 6).

10 Assessor checklist

• [ ] Model granularity confirmed (4.3); company-by-nature criteria read at the manufacturer of record; warranty/field-action records not pooled across differing support terms.
• [ ] Assessment tier fixed per criterion; not-applicable set recorded (Step 1); reachable maximum recorded.
• [ ] MS-1 QMS scored against the strongest certificate held; scope checked to cover the model’s production; lapsed/unverifiable certificate not credited; certificate rung applied only if publicly verifiable (7.4).
• [ ] MS-2 company track record scored from years, units and regions; solvency/ownership left to MS-7.
• [ ] MS-3 warranty honouring scored; warranty terms exist (evidence bar); out-of-warranty and documented-misuse denials excluded; company-wide fallback recorded if used (7.6).
• [ ] MS-4 field support conduct scored on issue/closure of bulletins and corrective actions; company-wide fallback recorded if used (7.6).
• [ ] MS-5 disclosure conduct scored on completeness and consistency; pack submitted or public disclosures exist (evidence bar).
• [ ] MS-6 training and operator-competence provision scored on programme and materials.
• [ ] MS-7 going concern scored from public court/regulatory/financial evidence; undisclosed event or withdrawn support scored 0 (7.5).
• [ ] Each award capped at the assessed-tier ceiling (5.3); no-evidence criteria scored 0, never null (5.4).
• [ ] Company-wide and parent-company substitutions recorded (Step 3; 7.6).
• [ ] Score, per-criterion points, tier and ceiling reached recorded to the passport (Step 6, VRS-GEN-009).

Bibliography

• ISO 9001:2015, Quality management systems — Requirements (International Organization for Standardization; 6th edition ISO 9001:2026 published 2026-09-16).
• ISO 13485:2016, Medical devices — Quality management systems — Requirements for regulatory purposes.
• SAE AS9100D:2016, Quality Management Systems — Requirements for Aviation, Space and Defense Organizations (rev. D, 2016).
• IATF 16949:2016, Quality management system requirements for automotive production and relevant service part organizations (International Automotive Task Force, 1st edition).
• ISO 10002:2018, Quality management — Customer satisfaction — Guidelines for complaints handling in organizations (3rd edition; reaffirmed 2023).
• ISO 9000:2015, Quality management systems — Fundamentals and vocabulary.
• Directive (EU) 2019/771 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 May 2019 on certain aspects concerning contracts for the sale of goods (applies from 1 January 2022; amended by Directive (EU) 2024/1799).
• Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, 15 U.S.C. §2301 et seq. (1975); FTC interpretations, 16 CFR Parts 700–703.
• Actuarial Standards Board, ASOP No. 12, Risk Classification (for All Practice Areas) (rev. 2005, effective 1 May 2006) — the signals-not-prices boundary (§8, Step 6).

Change history