I am curious since I see questions of various kinds here.....so I also have a couple of questions.....

Does the reader have a supplier monitoring group to go to suppliers and oversee/audit or otherwise inspect them?

What Standard (if any) does the group operate under? (e.g. ISO 9001, TS-16949, ISO/IEC 17020)

What kinds of issues appear to be consistent issues?

Just curious.........

Hershal

I am curious since I see questions of various kinds here.....so I also have a couple of questions.....

Does the reader have a supplier monitoring group to go to suppliers and oversee/audit or otherwise inspect them?

What Standard (if any) does the group operate under? (e.g. ISO 9001, TS-16949, ISO/IEC 17020)

What kinds of issues appear to be consistent issues?

Just curious.........

HershalDo I understand you are asking about an in-house group? Long before ISO management systems Standards were a gleam in anybody's eye, large organizations had subsets of their Quality and/or Purchasing departments who continually monitored downstream members of the supply chain for everything ranging from tracking on-time delivery to having on-site, full-time inspectors who second-guessed the supplier's own inspectors before the products would ever leave the supplier's premises.

Some used the designation "SQA" (Supplier Quality Assurance.) Then as now, the SQA job was to assure product and supplier, itself, met the customer's requirements, which today can now include adherence to established international Standards for Systems (ISO, ASME, etc.)

My experience with supply chain issues may have been different from other folks. We spent a lot more time on qualifying a supplier BEFORE signing the first contract (I'm only talking here about "custom" suppliers versus off-the-shelf ones) than most of our competitors did.

We found the payoff in greatly reduced soft costs of managing great suppliers versus constantly riding herd on poor or mediocre suppliers.

Our biggest problem was getting suppliers to believe us when we said, "We are more interested in getting good products or service than in punishing mistakes. Tell us immediately when a problem starts to develop so we can help cure it." Years of dealing with other companies had taught them to NEVER volunteer when they encountered a problem, because customers would drop them in a heartbeat.

I am, in the near future, taking on the role of our first Supplier Quality Engineer (Promotion? or just a way to get me out of our floor's hair:rolleyes: ). As of now, I only plan on "auditing" a supplier to our newly created Supplier Quality Manual. It specifies registration to ISO-9001 but I'm not leaning toward "double checking" their registrar's efforts. I will be more concerned with their "automotive mindset", even though they may not be seeking TS registration.

I hope to be able to establish the same kind of working relationship with all our suppliers as I have currently built with the customers I am "responsible" for. It hasn't happened overnight and took a lot of work, but the benefits far outweigh the "cat and dog" relationships we hear so much about.