Global Supplier Quality Management System (SQMS)

“We can’t control what we don’t measure.” 

As Global SQE, I walk the fine line between supply chain and quality. Prior to me, there was no supplier quality engineer or supplier quality management system at MDC Precision. As the first SQE to work for the company, I was given the simple job to manage MDC’s supplier quality, globally. 

To do this at scale, I needed to build systems into the underdeveloped company. Data systems, communication systems, enforcement systems, and more. 

My first objective was to find some useful data. Since we didn’t have any, I needed to create it. The company was collecting data, but it was not useful for what I needed as SQE. Specifically, there was no visibility on which suppliers were responsible for which nonconformances. There’s a saying that goes “garbage in, garbage out.” There is another saying that goes "We can’t control what we don’t measure.” As such, I made it a requirement to report the vendor responsible for a nonconformance, which eliminated the issue of "phantom suppliers" ruining our supplier DPPM metric. 

In the graphs below, the red bar shows the count of nonconformances created without designating a vendor responsible for it, while the blue bars show count of nonconformances with each respective associated vendors. You can clearly see the reduction of “phantom suppliers” from the year before compared to the year of the change.

Although it was a quick and easy change, it was the little push needed to get the SQMS snowballing. For the first time, the company had opened its eyes to supplier performance. 

Now that the data was useful, I then needed to measure 3 primary Supply Chain/Quality KPI’s:

1. Defect rates (DPPM)

2. On-time-delivery (OTD)

3. Pricing changes

To do this, I needed to engineer data reporting and information systems. I chose Python and SQL as my tools to automate the extraction, processing, and distributing of the vast amounts of data. In the next section, Data Pipeline and Supplier Scorecards, I articulate the natural progression and thought process to managing the global supply chain's quality with the resources at hand.