A supplier performance evaluation solution for proactive supplier quality management

Abstract

Today's business environment forces companies to rely heavily on suppliers for products, services, and software. The increased reliance on suppliers and the growing complexity of the products, services and extended supply chain raises the importance of having an effective supplier quality management system. One of the keys to an effective supplier quality management system is the ability to provide an end to end supplier performance evaluation system. In this paper, we present a Supplier Performance Evaluation (SPE) solution which has been developed and commercialized that provides effective decision support for sourcing and supplier improvement. More specifically, this solution provides a real-time evaluation of supplier performance by consolidating information across functions, organizations, and various product lines throughout the product lifecycle. Its scoring function combines both subjective and objective metrics using data from surveys, engineering, manufacturing quality, warranty claims and other sources. An embedded alert management function helps to raise the timely awareness of quality issues related to suppliers, or supplied parts. Finally, a supplier performance evaluation example process is illustrated to showcase the usage of the solution. © 2008 IEEE.