Supplier Quality Management | Quality Gurus

Achieving all these benefits requires an organized system for managing your suppliers’ activities and capabilities. It also means identifying key areas where improvements can be made to continually optimize your supplier relationships to ensure you receive consistently good quality and value from your suppliers.

Supplier Quality Management (SQM) aims to ensure that the highest quality standards are maintained throughout the entire supply chain. The primary purpose of SQM is to deliver consistent results, allowing companies to focus on other business objectives.

Organizations have become highly competitive over the last decade. This has increased pressure on them to improve their processes and reduce costs. The organizations have turned to suppliers who provide them with high-quality components, materials, and services to achieve these goals.

5 Critical Elements of Supplier Quality Management

There are five key elements to implementing a successful SQM program:

1. Supplier Selection / Approval

2. Clear Quality Requirements

3. Monitor Quality Performance – Audits, Inspections and Scorecards

4. Opportunities for Improvement

5. Open and Transparent Communication

These steps will help you develop a systematic way to manage your suppliers’ operations and ensure they understand what you require of them. They will also provide you with a framework to measure your success in SQM.

1. Supplier Selection / Approval

Selecting reliable and capable partners is fundamental to achieving any success when working together; therefore, the first step in developing an SQM strategy should be considering how qualified suppliers should be selected. A successful SQM program must start with selecting high-performing suppliers and not just any supplier.

Using a structured method for evaluating suppliers allows you to compare their performance against similar suppliers. By measuring their performance using standard criteria, you can choose suppliers based on their level of compliance, rather than just ‘goodness’ alone. Such methods allow you to make a fair comparison between suppliers and give you a benchmark that shows how compliant or non-compliant each is.

2. Clear Quality Requirements

Before buying any goods or services from a supplier, make sure that they have a clear idea about precisely what it is that you want in return. A simple list of specifications may suffice if only low volume, low-value items are bought, and you are not concerned about the manufacturing process. However, when you are ordering critical goods in large quantities, it is imperative to specify the type of item you need clearly and details such as raw material to be used, the process of manufacturing, packaging, inspection and testing requirements etc.

Make sure that your specification includes information about quality, delivery dates, lead times, safety regulations and any other relevant parameters.

3. Monitor Quality Performances – Audits, Inspects, and Scorecards

Once you have established a clear set of quality requirements, you need to monitor the supplier’s performance against those demands. Depending upon the criticality of the product, volume or the dollar value of the purchase order, you might conduct regular audits and inspections. Audits show whether the supplier adheres to the standards and guidelines set out by the agreed supplier quality management system (QMS). 

The inspection activities to monitor supplier performance could include:

· Monitoring production through routine checks

· Monitoring quality at critical stages during the manufacturing process

· Sampling the finished product and comparing it to the accepted standard

· Incoming inspection at the buyer’s facility

A supplier scorecard is another valuable tool to use in assessing supplier performance. It is a summary sheet of parameters against which the supplier performance is evaluated. The purpose of the scorecard is to identify areas of strength, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement.

4. Opportunities for Improvement

Inspections and audits are essential tools for ensuring that suppliers perform according to agreed quality standards. They will just ensure that the supplier meets or does not meet the requirements.

The next essential element of the Supplier Quality Management System is “improvement.”

This means taking action to improve the effectiveness of the programme and/or reducing the risk that the supplier fails to meet the agreed requirements. Therefore, when the supplier performs below expectation, you then take corrective actions to eliminate the cause of the problem.

In addition, by using Risk-Based Thinking, you remove potential problems that have never occurred.

By adopting a culture of continuous improvement, you will be able to achieve sustained improvements in your supply chain performance. Through this model, it becomes possible to continuously reduce variation and risk, improving the overall reliability of your supply chain.

It also helps create a framework for continual improvement within the organization and encourages staff to remain open-minded towards new ideas and suggestions.

5. Open and Transparent Communication

Effective communication with suppliers is an integral part of effective supplier quality management. This ensures that both parties understand each other’s expectations.

Communication should also include sharing information regarding processes and procedures, including training programmes, maintenance plans, key changes, and other related information. By doing so, it will help reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Conclusion

Supplier Quality Management is a systematic approach to managing the relationship between buyers and suppliers. It ensures that all aspects of the relationship are managed effectively to provide consistent levels of service delivery.

Supplier Quality Management can be applied to many different industries. However, it is most commonly used in the manufacturing industry, where supplier quality management focuses on delivering high-quality products and services to customers.