Most of what you ship was made, at least in part, by someone else: castings, bar stock, plating, heat treat, machining. A supplier quality program is how you make sure those inputs meet your requirements before they reach your floor and your customer. Whether you are building one from scratch or tightening one that grew by accident, the pieces are the same.
The six pieces of a supplier quality program
- Requirements. A supplier quality manual or purchase order clauses that say what you expect: certifications, inspection, change notification, record retention, counterfeit parts controls, flow-down of your customers' requirements.
- Qualification. How a supplier earns a place on your approved supplier list: an assessment, certificates, a self-assessment, sometimes an audit and a first article or PPAP.
- The approved supplier list. One list of who is approved, for what, with what status, owned by quality and checked by purchasing before every order.
- Monitoring. Receiving inspection, supplier NCRs, on-time delivery and a periodic scorecard, plus certificate expiry and periodic re-assessment.
- Corrective action. SCARs when something goes wrong, with containment, root cause and verification, and follow-up when responses are late.
- Development. Working with key suppliers to improve: business reviews, training, development projects.
The order to build it in
Start with what reduces risk fastest. Write down your requirements and get your current suppliers to acknowledge them. Build the approved supplier list from the suppliers you actually buy from, with their scope and certificates. Then start recording supplier NCRs and SCARs in one place, because that data drives everything else. Scorecards, re-assessments and development programs come once you have a few months of data.
Where programs usually stall
- The list lives in a spreadsheet nobody trusts. Purchasing buys from whoever is cheapest because the list is out of date.
- Certificates expire unnoticed. The first time anyone checks is the audit.
- SCARs go out by email and die there. Nobody tracks who owes a response.
- No time for development. The team spends every week firefighting the same few suppliers.
Where outside help speeds things up
Building a program takes concentrated effort that a small quality team rarely has. Specialists can assess your supply base, run supplier audits and PPAPs, set up SCAR management and dashboards, and train your suppliers, while your team keeps the plant running.
FactoryQA's Supplier Quality Services start by looking at your supply base with you, then cover qualification, management, training and supply chain security. The program runs in the Supplier Quality module: approved supplier list, certifications, evaluations, self-assessments, scorecards and SCARs, with a portal suppliers answer through without an account.