Auditor recommends better Vendor (Supplier) Auditing

[Special K]

Hi Everybody - new boy to the forum - We are an high end audio mixer manufacturing company who have acheived the ISO 9000 standard on our V2 visit the 3rd party auditor mentioned that she would like to see a more robust structure to our vendor assessment/auditing can anybody offer a good guide to this activity, please.

 

[Colin]

Re: Vendor Auditing

Welcome to the Cove Special K

I guess it depends on what you already do, can you give us an outline of your existing process?

My first thoughts would be to categorise the suppliers in terms of their criticality to you as a business. From there you can isolate the key suppliers and start to analyse their performance depending upon your criteria e.g. quality of product/service, delivery performance, number of faults/rejects etc. by monitoring deliveries and recording their results.

You may then want to consider auditing the main suppliers to establish how good their processes are in addition to how good (or not) their products are.

 

[RoxaneB]

Re: Vendor Auditing

Special K, welcome!

Have you done a search on this subject? The top right of your screen has the Search button feature. I'm sure we've discussed this subject before and you may even find some useful tools (e.g., spreadsheets, assessment questionnaires, etc.).

Colpart gives good advice. Consider what is most important to you with regard to what you procure. From there you can develop a rating system and determine:

• Who your more critical suppliers are
• How suppliers are performing
• Who needs more attention from you

In some cases, if a supplier is not up to snuff, you may wish to discontinue any relationship with him. Or, if he's open to improvement, work with your supplier to develop an outstanding relationship!

 

[AndyN]

Re: Vendor Auditing

Hi Everybody - new boy to the forum - We are an high end audio mixer manufacturing company who have acheived the ISO 9000 standard on our V2 visit the 3rd party auditor mentioned that she would like to see a more robust structure to our vendor assessment/auditing can anybody offer a good guide to this activity, please.

Hello Special K! Greetings from an ex-Pat Brit, here in darkest Michigan.

A word of caution. When an auditor says things like that, alarm bells should be ringing! "She would like to see..........." Your words or hers? Non-conformance for ineffectiveness or not? Beware, without qualification, these words may be start of a wild goose chase!

Did the auditor give you some kind of indication as to why she feels it's not robust enough? If it was a passing comment I'd treat it with some scepticism. If it wasn't formally reported back to her management, that's another clue to it being an off the cuff comment. Before you start down this path of fixing something that's not broken, we need a bit of clarification here.

BTW - what part of Blighty?

 

[Special K]

Re: Vendor Auditing

Hi Andy
We have been doing vendor questionnaire as our method of assessment however our QMS states vendor visit to assess vendor QMS, plus on the V2 visit the auditor saw component delivery failures and we needed to tighten up on non-conforming product.
Factory located at Potters Bar and living approx 30 miles up the A1 in Bedfordshire, we have friends living at Traverse City and I've enjoy some Salmon fishing in Lake Michigan.

Kevin

 

[AndyN]

Re: Vendor Auditing

Hey Kevin:
That's my part of the world! Actually I lived in Nazeing, Essex! Recently, I met a chap over here working for F*rd (in the Land Rover dealership) who lived in Broxbourne!

Well, they have you if you use a questionnaire and say you do audits. However, there are many alternatives you can use, depending on the performance and controls your supplier have in place and the risk you are prepared to accept.

For example, as past SQA for Renishaw Metrology, I didn't waste my time with a questionnaire - suppliers lie - well, in their minds they don't, but it's not always reliable information they give. Doing audits isn't always practical, since it's potentially a drain on resources to do that for all suppliers.

Other ways you can qualify supplier include sample approvals, with delivery documentation, past performance with similar products, ISO reg (of course) etc. But your methods should be selected, based on the risk of dealing with a commodity from a supplier. We had a single source in Switzerland (costly to audit) and he wouldn't let us in the factory, so we chose to sample his product and he agreed to send his inspection data. No problem.

Alternately, when we got some samples in from a place up in the Rugby/Leicester area, once we'd sampled them and they failed (badly) we decided to audit them to see what was going on - they were so out of control, they were going bankrupt!

So, it's horses for courses.

 

[Special K]

Hi Andy

We have several problem suppliers who have basically kept the purchasing department happy up until now, delivery times excellent reject rate abissmal so they look great on delivery KPI's. Now I come along and ask about things such as reject rate and I get thats not our problem thats the quality departments job, then I have the pleasure of telling the Purchasing Manager that according to both the QMS & ISO verification of purchased product is his.
So here I sit watching the shots flying between the Quality Director & the Finance Director and I still am expected to come up with an audit schedule, checklist and reports (only 82 suppliers in the UK same amount in China) all before the 3rd party auditor comes for the V3 visit.

All help, guidance or shorcuts will be greatfully received.

Kevin.

 

[Colin]

Kevin, I agree with Andy regarding questionnaires, they are useful to gather superficial information but not much more.

As suggested earlier, identify your 'key' suppliers. That could be in terms of highest spend, most problems, critical components, etc. you decide. Then work out a manageable program for the audits you are going to do. No sensible 3rd party auditor would expect them all done at once so show him/her a plan for what you will do. Just don't promise the earth or you will not be able to achieve it.

Make sure you do some visits and then you can show the auditor what you are achieving. Work on the 80/20 rule in terms of killing off the biggest problems by targeting the 'critical few'.

 

[Jimmy the Brit]

Hi Kevin,

Some excellent advice already. In addition I would make sure that I had considered my possible response(s) before I pushed ahead with the program: If you find one of your critical suppliers quality is out of control, but is the sole supplier to your process, what actions would you be willing/able to make? If they are unwilling to change, but are fundamental to your production what can you do? Having a pile of audit report saying "the supplier is rubbish, but we can't do anything about it" is pretty feeble, so you need to consider the possible outcomes and agree them with senior management before embarking on a program that may damage you and have no effect on the supplier.

I have been in this position before where a supplier just laughed at us when we wanted changes to their processes, pointing out that we were so small a customer that we just weren't worth the candle. My team had to point out the possible efficiency savings they could make from our recommendations before they would move a millimetre, and even then they remained a nuisance for years, until we finally found an alternative supplier.

 

[Sidney Vianna]

Are we asking the right questions?

Are we really delving into the problem? The way I see it, physically auditing your supplier is not the answer, unless something concrete will come from those visits that will make the supplier performance improve.

Going through the motions of auditing suppliers will not magically transform the problem ones. The question you should be asking is: What do we need to do in order to gain sustainable performance improvement from our vendors?