on Leadership & Career

When I joined Hewlett-Packard in 1988, I was assigned to a team that was working on a design for manufacturability manual for printed circuit board designers.

Our primary objective was to provide performance and cost information that could be used to guide decisions about different design options.

My favorite project during that time was a predictive model to estimate the manufacturing yield of a PCB design based on a composite “complexity” metric.

Because we were an internal supplier, I was able to look at the actual lot yields for hundreds of active part numbers with known design parameters, so it seemed like a fairly straightforward exercise to experiment with different regression models to find an optimum fit between complexity and yield.

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In a recent post, I wrote about suppliers who claim to be committed to quality but may not actually behave that way.

Before getting too carried away with improving quality in the supply chain, it’s probably a good idea to understand your own company’s commitment to quality, although I see nothing wrong with holding your suppliers to a higher standard.

It may seem impressive when businesses highlight quality as a core value, something that’s published on their website and displayed on their walls, but is that just for show?

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Suppliers always declare their commitment to the highest standards of quality as a core value, but many have trouble living up to that promise.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve visited suppliers who proudly display their framed ISO certificates in the lobby yet suffer from persistent quality problems that lead to higher cost and schedule delays.

Here’s how you can tell if they’re really serious:

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Quality issues have been on my mind a lot lately, specifically some of the more frustrating things that I’ve had to deal with during my career as a quality manager.

In my last job, my team was responsible for managing the discrepant material review (DMR) process for our US-based factory.

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A recent LinkedIn discussion addressed the question of the best strategy for dealing with poor supplier performance.

A lot of the respondents seemed to advocate a punitive approach, either threatening the loss of future business if performance doesn’t improve, or combing through the terms & conditions of the contract for enforcement language.

I’ve always thought that there’s a lot of similarity between managing suppliers and managing subordinates, and I wonder if some of these same people threaten their teams with punitive actions when individual performance doesn’t meet expectations. [Read more…]