I was at a meeting with Sam Quintana at San Diego, Clairmont, talking to the Director of Quality Engineering about getting the best out of Mexican suppliers. He said his biggest problem with Mexican engineers and managers was their “Tomorrow” attitude on problems resolution. Americans have the “ Today” attitude in problem resolution. He placed a customer quality representative inside the supplier factory to overcome the Mexican barrier and sit on the Mexicans. He was unaware that Sam Quintana, my MexControl manager is a Mexican. The truth hurts. However, Sam got the idea and placed a rep inside the factory for the customer.Generally most large outsourced suppliers have web-based quality management systems for their own internal usage. Smaller and newly emerging overseas suppliers may have weaker systems or are lacking in these QMS. Most established customers also have their own internally preferred QMS which they almost always insist their contracted suppliers use and comply with. Suppliers may conform to a specific customer requirement because of contractual obligations but without any guarantee that they will apply it efficiently. In AMREP our supplier quality representatives help suppliers to provide good data feedback by going over the data insertion. Here’s how we improve supplier’s conformance to data insertion and quality improvement. We define inspection points in the supplier’s manufacturing line and define quality attributes to be collected at those inspections points. Consequently the supplier’s managers have real-time visibility on quality problems.
Trend all collected data, identify issues and create corrective actions to be implemented at the supplier’s factory. Our AMREP quality specialists identify the root causes, work out the problem resolution and collaborate with the supplier and customer to track the progress of the corrective actions.
Audit the supplier’s processes on a regular basis to correlate corrective actions against implementation.
