The Supplier Development System (SDS) consists of 2 major components, namely:
1) Supplier Quality Assessment: A Quality Audit is conducted on the supplier’s factory site, together with their Business Owner and CEO or General Manager. It is very critical for your company to fully understand your key suplier’s Leadership Style, Quality Culture, & its production process prior to buying any products from them. Therefore, we begin the audit on the CEO or General Manager’s operation & financial management activities. The audit findings will motivate the Business Owner to pay attention to Quality Improvement areas & learn how to reduce Cost of Poor Qualiy (COPQ). We recommend you, as the customer, to conduct the above Supplier Quality Asessment (SQA) prior to your selection & qualification of your key suppliers. The QSR Assessment Quality Maturity Matrix is use to determine the supplier’s level of Quality Maturity.
2) Supplier Improvement: Most suppliers normally start off with a very good New Product Sample, however soon after the customer authorized the New Product Mass Production release, product delivery issues begin to surface during the mass production stage due to poor process & product quality. It is therefore very important for you, as the customer, to help your supplier to further improve their production process and product quality performance. We recommend a 2-step approach in Supplier Improvement, namely:
(a) Fast Track: Six Sigma
(b) Long Track: Lean System
The Fast Track – Six Sigma approach will help your suppliers to identify root cause of quality problems, construct effective corrective actions, implement quality improvement plans and eliminate defectives in the production processes. Within a short period of about 3-4 weeks, supplier could achieve a lower defective rate with minimum cost of poor quality.
In order to sustain this higher quality performance results, we recommend the Long Track – Lean System for your supplier. The Lean System requires a longer period (9-12 months) to implement as it requires a total change in your production flow, equipment layout, work in progress inventory level, operator skill set, quality mindset and housekeeping attitude. Once it is fully implemented, the Lean System brings a very sustaining & breakthrough product quality and cost reduction performance results.
Contact us for a Complimentary One-to-One Business Consultation via Skype (worth US$500) to discuss the needs of your company and see how we can help you achieve your business objectives.