By The Pro QC Quality Assurance Team Part 1 – Supplier Identification, Quality Systems Audits & Supplier Relationship Management You’ve already defined your targets in support of your business strategy. You have designed and defined the product specifications that are necessary to fulfill your customer’s needs. Now you just need to find and collaborate with a reliable supplier to produce a product that meets your specifications. A reliable supplier or factory delivers excellent product quality, ensures on-time delivery at a competitive cost and most importantly within an ethically responsible environment. However, finding the right supplier or vendor is only half the battle – maintaining the supplier relationship and performance throughout is key to achieving long term success. We’ve put together a go-to guide for this and other topics related to supplier development that you’ll need to bear in mind as you embark on your production and quality journey. Choosing a Supplier The hardest part about getting started is finding the right supplier. You do need to dedicate time to this – when you begin your supplier identification investigation, it is always a good practice to dedicate resources to formally review and approve your list of suppliers. Whether it is being done internally by your own team or outsourced to a reputable agent, an approved vendor list is a crucial first step to achieving quality assurance. A supplier with the right technical capability is obviously important, but one should never overlook production capacity and quality consistency. A small manufacturer may not be able to keep up with your demand whereas a big manufacturer may have too many orders to cater to your needs, which often leads to late delivery. Another important consideration is the legal side – contracts, tax audits and so forth – this is part of a different service usually, but one that is imperative to ensure is included in your forward-planning as you embark on your supplier investigation. When Pro QC gets started finding our clients the right supplier, we assess their potential options on-site – doing a deeper check into a shortlist of factories, visiting them to verify documentation and environmental and working conditions. One challenge when you don’t already have a relationship with a supplier can be getting valid references and ensuring the accuracy of information. Stringent background checks are imperative. We then provide detailed reports on their general operations, quality systems, qualifications, and capabilities. We are also able to locate and manage the supplier base for you, as your sourcing agent. Through our initial supplier audit, we evaluate the supplier’s current practices – e.g. operational excellence & working conditions – to ensure they are right for you. Alongside this is ensuring the legal registrations are valid for suppliers, and that they have passed all relevant certification checks. Once you’ve narrowed down a supplier that works for you, always have at least one back-up in mind in case you quickly realize the first relationship may not be quite the right fit. Production Quality and Audit To make sure your suppliers are manufacturing your product to expected levels of quality, Supplier Audits, or what we call jQuery(document).ready(function($) { $.post('https://proqc.com/blog/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php', {action: 'wpt_view_count', id: '2423'}); });
