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Future trends in supply chain quality management |
J. L. CAWLEY, Northwest Analytical, Inc., 519 S.W. Park Ave., Portland, OR 97205 The evolution the quality role in supply chain management (SCM) will be shaped by the goals of reducing procurement risk and overhead. This involves reducing the effects of sub-standard materials on process efficiency, product quality, and exposure to product liability. Overhead reduction involves transferring incoming inspection responsibilities to vendors and moving the customer’s quality function to an audit mode. Critical health and safety issues still require inspection. The procurement model evolves from lowest price to a lowest total cost, highest value model. This process requires ever closer vendor-customer data interchange and process integration. The food industry programs are in their early phase and in the future will expand in scope and change the nature of vendor/customer relationships and extend the technology of SCM quality management. More vendors and product categories will be covered by SCM quality monitoring programs. SCM quality management will become part of the continuous process improvement model. Successful SCM quality programs will evolve from coercive to collaborative vendor/customer relationships. Complete integration of process information is the target. This includes both feed forward and feedback. The vendor needs information on how their raw material ran in the customer’s process to make necessary improvements to their system. The enabling data handling and reporting systems will incorporate greater quality management capabilities. The systems which affect SCM will expand integration and communication capabilities. This includes greater use of Web technology for both quality data collection and reporting. Accompanying the increase in SCM quality technology, companies need to train staff to be aware of how to effectively use the increased visibility of quality information. The long term goal of SCM Quality programs is to reduce risk and variation, increase functionality and profitability.
Session 5, Supply chain process and quality management in the food industry
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