Key facts
- Purpose: make sure bought-in parts, materials and services meet your requirements, every delivery.
- Who runs it: quality and purchasing, with input from operations and engineering.
- Core activities: supplier approval, incoming inspection, supplier audits, scorecards and supplier corrective action requests.
- Why it matters: a defect that enters your plant from a supplier is paid for in scrap, rework, line stops and, if it escapes, customer complaints.
What are the steps of supplier quality management?
- Define requirements. Put specifications, drawings, test methods and delivery terms in the purchase agreement so there is no guesswork.
- Qualify and approve suppliers. Assess new suppliers with a questionnaire or an on-site audit before the first order, and record the result.
- Inspect incoming goods. Check deliveries at receiving against the specification. Tighten sampling for new or poor performers and relax it for proven ones.
- Monitor performance. Track each supplier on a scorecard and review it on a fixed rhythm.
- Respond to problems. Record the non-conformance, contain the affected stock and ask the supplier for a root cause and a fix through a supplier corrective action request.
- Develop and review. Audit regularly, work with strategic suppliers to improve, and move persistent poor performers out.
What should a supplier scorecard measure?
| Measure | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Incoming defect rate | Parts per million or percentage of delivered units rejected |
| On-time, in-full delivery | Whether the supplier ships what you ordered, when you ordered it |
| Corrective action response | How quickly and how well they close problems |
| Audit result | Whether their process controls hold up on site |
| Cost of poor quality | Scrap, rework and line-stop cost caused by their supply |
Use the same measures across suppliers so you can compare them fairly.
How is supplier quality management different from quality control?
Quality control checks the product you make. Supplier quality management works one step earlier, on the inputs, and aims to prevent problems at the source instead of catching them at your dock. The two meet at receiving inspection. Both belong to a wider quality assurance system.
Example: a recurring supplier defect
A food packaging plant rejects three deliveries of film in a month because of weak seals. The receiving team logs each rejection as a non-conformance and holds the stock. The quality lead raises a corrective action request with the supplier, who finds a worn sealing bar and replaces it. Seal failures drop on the next deliveries, the supplier's scorecard shows the improvement, and the plant eases inspection sampling to match.