Section II

Supplier Responsibilities

It has been said many times in many situations, garbage in, garbage out. In fact, it is known as the GIGO principle. In the case of launching a program on time, on budget, and with minimum interruptions (for whatever reason), that process is a function of the supplier doing the best it can all the time. Of course, in order for this to happen, the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) (customer) must have identified the requirements.

There is no argument that the behavior of the supplier is of paramount importance in this process. So let us identify the issues, concerns, and requirements that any supplier has and the antidotes for poor performance.

To be sure, nothing is perfect! However, perfection can be defined based on the set requirements that a customer requires of a supplier. Small or indifferent deviations may indeed be overlooked, but in the case of the supplier satisfying the customer, it is the suppliers responsibility to either eliminate or minimize the issues, concerns, or problems so that flawless launching takes place. To do this, an organization must have core business strategies, planning, and a vision for continual improvement. This must be a way of life and a relentless perseverance to perfection. A pictorial view of at least one approach to this journey are shown in the core business strategy chart on the next page. There are many variations of this, and every organization should develop its own.

In Section II, we are going to examine some of the requirements that every supplier must understand and practice so that the customer will receive the product and/or service flawlessly. Above all, by following the concepts on which we have focused, we are certain that organizations will improve dra-matically. A survey in the Modern Machine Shop Journal (September 2014, 8187) supports my contention. The results are summarized in the table on the next page. The article does not say what the overall sample was, but it does indi-cate that the sample was taken from aerospace, automotive, military, and equipment suppliers.

68 Supplier Responsibilities

One approach to core business strategy

VI. Level production

V. Pull system

IV. Synchronous production

III. Continuous flow

II. Stability

I. VisionPhase

Time Management labor relationsShare vision & receive buy in Develop roles &

responsibilities

TPM

Errorproofing

Empoweredteams

Flexiblework Marketplace

Takttime

Levelschedule

Every partevery dayFixed

productionplan

JITKanban

Improvement withcore business

strategy

Quickchangeover

KaizenProduction

control board

Line layoutcell layout

Visualfactory

Baselineanalysis

MeasurableOEE, DTD, FTT

Smallerlot size

Standardizedwork

Value streammappingSafety

programs

5SDevelop

vision

6-Sigma

Line loadanalysis

Materiallogistics

Improvementwithout core

business strategy

Top Five Improvement Methods Top Five Supply Chain Practices

ItemsTop Shops

(%)Others

(%) ItemsTop Shops

(%)Others

(%)

Continuous improvement program

85 55 Customer satisfaction surveys

70 30

5S workplace organization

63 42 Access to customer forecasts

63 31

Cellular manufacturing

44 25 Just-in-time customer delivery

59 35

Just-in-time manufacturing

44 30 Sharing forecasts with suppliers

59 18

Quality certifications 59 45 Design for manufacturability

56 28

Furthermore, scientific evidence presented by Lakhal (2014) suggests that ISO 9000, total quality management (TQM) practices, and organizational perfor-mance have a direct significant relationship with excellence (p