Why one grade, and why in the open
A supplier portfolio of several hundred names cannot be steered from questionnaire scores alone, nor from external ratings alone: the first describe the day the supplier answered, the second describe its internet-facing surface and nothing of the service it renders. A composite grade is the reading a risk committee can act on, on condition that it can be opened. Every Trust Grade shows what produced it, so a disputed letter becomes a conversation about a weight or a stale signal, not about the tool.
What moves it
A new assessment answer with its evidence; a change in the business impact of the service, for instance when a value-chain review reclassifies the activity the supplier supports; an external rating that degrades or recovers, brought in through the marketplace connectors. Freshness matters: an assessment from two years ago weighs less than one from last quarter, and the grade says so. Coverage matters too: with only one of the three inputs, the grade is withheld.
Where it lives
The Trust Grade sits in the Supplier Hub of the Third-Party Risk Management module, next to the contextual assessments, the partner enrollment and the joint action plans, and it is the value the supply-chain KRIs and the board reporting read when they count degraded critical suppliers. It is a Mindlapse concept, not an industry standard, which is why this glossary names it as such.