If you want to produce high-quality products, you need a supply chain of consistently high quality. But this does not happen by itself - especially in times of increasingly fragile supply chains. Developing solutions to this problem is therefore essential for survival.
The key question is always the same:
Where did the quality defect occur in the first place?
In view of the complexity of supply chains, in many areas it is not at all clear whether quality defects are caused by you or your supplier. For example, if bottles break in a bottling plant or cartons cannot be folded, the question arises: Is this due to the quality of the supplied bottle or cartons? Or is it due to your handling?
However, quick localization is crucial. The longer it takes to find a fault or its cause, the higher the costs incurred.
Three strategic goals
If you want to maintain a consistent level of quality in your supply chains, you should address three questions. The first and most pressing is:
How do you quickly create transparency here?
This is followed by the second question:
How do you prioritize the quality problems to be solved given the complexity of the technologies and the multitude of challenges?
In order to finally establish seamless process control along the entire value chain, it is important to institutionalize the corresponding procedures. The third question is therefore:
How do you establish permanent process control?
The answers to these three questions indicate the three strategic objectives that should guide the management of complex supply chains. In my experience, these six measures have proven to be effective in implementing the relevant measures:
- Make quality assurance a task for all those involved in value creation
- Localize errors in the supply chain
- Build dedicated project teams
- Prioritize accumulating quality problems
- Establish permanent process control
- Integrate shopfloor management into quality assurance
Start with transparency
1. Step 1: Make the quality of the supply chain a joint task.
Suppliers are service providers, you are the customer or client, and this results in a subordinate relationship. You have the power. However, in the case of complex faults that cannot be clearly assigned to a cause, this position of power is of no use to you in the first instance. Manufacturing a marketable product is an overarching process that involves the entire value chain: from the supplier's preliminary product to production at the supplier's premises to your production and delivery to the customer.
That's why I always recommend seeking cooperation with all companies involved in value creation at the outset. Raising awareness that quality is in everyone's hands, is a shared responsibility. This opens up the opportunity to increase the efficiency of your measures.
2nd step: Ensure seamless, cross-company process control.
What should you start with when you solve a problem together with your suppliers? First of all, you need a common database. If errors accumulate, you need to know:
- What exactly happened?
- Where were the batches that went into the faulty products produced? At your premises and/or at your supplier's?
Of course, you build on traceability: you assign defects in products to specific production batches at your premises or at your supplier's. You can then see when and where errors accumulate and can finally investigate whether and when essential process parameters have changed there.
A shared database of this kind does not have to be automated in the first step. Rather, it is important that the data is available quickly. In the medium term, a specific accumulation of disruptions should automatically trigger data collection - seamlessly and across the entire supply chain.
Develop focused solutions
3rd step: Form joint project teams.
Classical supplier management will not get you anywhere when it comes to solving really complex problems. Instead, you should form dedicated project teams that are made up of experts from you and your suppliers. Ideally, they should work together according to a recognized method, for example Lean Six Sigma.
In addition to the project team, set up a steering team that is made up of managers from different departments and companies and that can make decisions quickly and approve the necessary measures if key parameters in production need to be changed.
4th step: Prioritize problems.
Do not tackle too many of the problems that you have identified in your root cause analysis at the same time. You're going to say, that's a lot of work! And not without good reason.
However, you only have to do this once. Because a serious problem is solved permanently. It is necessary to focus: Having solved a few problems permanently is better than having only tackled many problems.
Institutionalize process control
5th step: establish regular process control.
Step by step, you have brought your processes under control. Now it's important to maintain this level. You can do this by establishing statistical process control (SPC). This allows you to recognize at an early stage if parameters change at your supplier, at your company or at the customer - and you can take countermeasures quickly.
When introducing an SPC, you can build on the wealth of data you have already collected. And you can use the standards for cross-company SPC platforms as a guide, such as the standard ISO 11462.
6. Integrate your store floor management.
And last but not least: Integrate your shopfloor management into supply chain quality assurance. Because many problems can also be solved directly on the production line. And under two conditions:
Firstly, the flow of information must be right: If the properties of a supplier part or a substance change, your workers should know so that actual deviations are recognized as such.
Secondly, your employees should be trained and practiced in applying problem-solving methods independently.
Conclusion: Quality assurance of supply chains is a cross-company task
Supply chain management that is geared towards ensuring supply chain quality should start with process control that exceeds individual links or companies. This way
- you can react proactively to emerging quality problems at your suppliers,
- accelerate the analysis of root causes in case of emergency and
- have a platform, to resolve supply chain difficulties with your suppliers cooperatively - even if your suppliers are far away.
