No Quality Professional vs Having a Quality Professional

[NDesouza]

Hello All,
I am working with a couple of suppliers who refuse to hire a Quality Professional of any type such as a Manager, Specialist or QE to manage their QMS. The decision to not have any Quality professionals is costing these small suppliers tons of money and the confidence of their customers. I need to be able to show how suppliers with similar structures to theirs have been successful after hiring Quality professionals to their staff? They seem to think that they are saving money running very lean. The problem is that they are getting more SCARS as fast as we close the other ones.

Thanks for your help,
Nicole

 

[Mike S.]

IMO they won't be successful even after hiring "quality professionals" unless their attitude and the culture changes. Sounds like your suppliers don't "get it".

 

[Cari Spears]

What are these suppliers providing? And why do their customers keep using them if they're performing poorly?

 

[Ninja]

FWIW, our QM was a chemistry major with a B.S. .... one who "got it" in Mike S.'s parlance.
He was a quality professional...but far from a "Quality Professional".
We averaged 0.75 SCARS per year...

My point being that you may want to refocus your approach onto results rather than credentials...

 

[John Broomfield]

Your supplier reselection criteria allow your company to continue working with these troublesome suppliers?

Why?

Also, be careful what you wish for. You may have someone to talk to but you are imposing a solution that may not work.

I’d rather have the leader take personal responsibility for how their organization works (or not) as an effective system.

 

[optomist1]

yep...used to be QA was considered a necessary evil...and to a degree in the DoD Contractor world, many took the postion that the QA function was ncessary because....the Customer Requirements (Fed DoD) stated so....that thinking should died long ago...apparently bad habits die hard.

 

[Sidney Vianna]

IMO they won't be successful even after hiring "quality professionals" unless their attitude and the culture changes. Sounds like your suppliers don't "get it".

Right on. A "quality" professional in an organization with a toxic culture towards quality is devoured every day of the week and, even worse, during that time of the month when the slogan du jour is: when in doubt, ship it out.

I don't think customers should micro manage supplier's organizational charts and, instead of attempting to create a "quality" professional employment act, they should reward good suppliers with continuous business and the opposite with bad ones. It should go without saying, but any organization that has a significant number of dysfunctional suppliers should "look in the mirror" for the source of their problems.

 

[NDesouza]

IMO they won't be successful even after hiring "quality professionals" unless their attitude and the culture changes. Sounds like your suppliers don't "get it".

Thanks for your response. I was hoping that if they had someone to work on managing the quality of their organization and products, they might be more concerned with improvement. Right now they are only concerned with putting out fires rather than preventing them.

 

[NDesouza]

Right on. A "quality" professional in an organization with a toxic culture towards quality is devoured every day of the week and, even worse, during that time of the month when the slogan du jour is: when in doubt, ship out.

I don't think customers should micro manage supplier's organizational charts and, instead of attempting to create a "quality" professional employment act, they should reward good suppliers with continuous business and the opposite with bad ones. It should go without saying, but any organization that has a significant number of dysfunctional suppliers should "look in the mirror" for the source of their problems.

I agree. I think that this should have been fixed a long time ago. The fact that the customer has allowed these suppliers to operate in this manner is indicative of another set of issues that point to their lack of management of their suppliers. Here in these examples we have one supplier with ISO certification who does not have a QM, QE or QAS. When there is a SCAR the Chief of Operations answers the SCAR with not very robust RCCAs. Then we have another supplier with a Quality Manager who does not know understand what robust RCCAs are. Both suppliers refuse to either hire someone who has Quality background or go get training.

I am assigned to work with these suppliers to help them "improve"
I am not sure how to help people who refuse to knowledge that they even need any help

 

[silentmonkey]

I agree. I think that this should have been fixed a long time ago. The fact that the customer has allowed these suppliers to operate in this manner is indicative of another set of issues that point to their lack of management of their suppliers. Here in these examples we have one supplier with ISO certification who does not have a QM, QE or QAS. When there is a SCAR the Chief of Operations answers the SCAR with not very robust RCCAs. Then we have another supplier with a Quality Manager who does not know understand what robust RCCAs are. Both suppliers refuse to either hire someone who has Quality background or go get training.

I am assigned to work with these suppliers to help them "improve"
I am not sure how to help people who refuse to knowledge that they even need any help

Hi NDesouza,

Sounds like you're in quite the pickle.

Is it not up to your organisation to approve the progression and closure of SCARs? In my experience, the supplier develops an action plan, provides a root cause analysis and suggests a CAPA plan, and each of these stages could be subject to the organisation's approval.

Ultimately, it would be up to the organisation to accept or reject the outcome of a SCAR so if you have determined that the supplier's root cause and CAPA plan are not robust enough, you should reject this.

Lots of good points raised by other posters here; how does your organisation handle poorly performing suppliers?