Process industries focus on their core processes whilst certain activities are bought as outsourced services from a variety of suppliers. Corporate social responsibility highlights the need to manage and develop suppliers’ HSEQ capabilities. This study focuses on large Finnish industrial companies’ HSEQ cluster, and its’ actions for supplier development. This study includes interviews for large Finnish industrial companies and a database analysis on a sample of supplier audit reports. A macroergonomics analysis is conducted to show how the observations made in the audits, i.e. identified development topics or deviations, are of internal origin and mainly identify issues related to suppliers’ management processes and health and safety performance. In addition, suppliers’ own stakeholder management practices and processes were questioned in some cases. This study shows that this current HSEQ assessment practice by the cluster somewhat strongly identifies issues related to CSR. Yet, some development topics and future research aspects are identified that could help in tying the assessment procedure better with CSR. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.