SigmaQuest addresses supplier quality
Rick Nelson, Chief Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 5/1/2006 9:00:00 AM
SigmaQuest, a provider of software for managing product quality, is complementing its lab and factory offerings with Supplier Quality Insight, a new application in its SigmaSure suite that provides OEMs with the means to better manage and track the quality of suppliers’ components.
The company developed Supplier Quality Insight in response to key customer concerns, said Nader Fathi, SigmaQuest CEO, in a phone interview: "We found our customers were concerned about three things: design problems, process issues, and supplier issues. It's the supplier issues that really keep them up at night." He said that just as other SigmaSure applications enable companies to track the performance of their contract manufacturers (see, for example, a description of Plantronics' approach), Supplier Quality Insight gives OEMs the ability to define, capture, and track key component characteristic data from suppliers and their manufacturing partners.
Fathi said that suppliers are becoming more and more important as companies de-emphasize vertical integration to focus on their core competencies. As they do that, he said, they increasingly look to outside sources for components like power supplies. Suppliers, he said, influence product quality more than factor other than design quality. At the same time, he said, the customer's brand can suffer irreparable harm because of supplier quality problems.
Effectively addressing those problems, Fathi said, requires that customers and suppliers collaborate. He cited an Aberdeen Group report on supplier performance management that states that a customer relying on its internal efforts alone can increase supplier performance only about 21%, whereas collaborative efforts can yield improvements higher than 60%. The collaborative effort begins, he said, with a contract mandating that suppliers meet target performance goals and submit test data.
For companies employing Supplier Quality Insight, such data can be collected directly from suppliers' test equipment, pulled from data files, or loaded by suppliers into Web forms. An OEM customer can define a template indicating specification requirements. The data can span multiple real-time and historical data sources and encompass an entire extended supply chain, and it can also be integrated with data from design, ERP/MRP (enterprise resource planning/ materials requirements planning), MES (manufacturing execution systems), and CRM (customer relationship management) applications.
The application can be accessed via any Web browser; it uses Internet standards such as SML (semantic markup language) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). It can also be deployed across multiple sites with differing computing infrastructures. The software is available for direct license or as a SigmaQuest Web-hosted software service. It's available as a stand-alone offering or as part of the SigmaSure product suite. Starting price: $35,000.
