Question

Ford is hiring your consulting firm to improve their supply chain management competitive advantage by increasing the level of quality provided by its suppliers. Therefore, can your firm recommend how it can establish a framework program incorporating both management tools and techniques, and Professor Garvin's eight dimensions to improve Ford's supplier's quality problem?

Answer 1

As a consulting firm we need to understand the pain areas of our client and subsequently we need to derive a framework which ensures that he gets good quality product and on time delivery from his suppliers.

Professor Garvin’s eight point dimension can be utilised to ensure quality of all aspects in the business so why not in Supply chain management. These dimensions are performance, features, reliability, conformance, durability, serviceability, aesthetics and perceived quality. So let’s discuss one by one:

Performance: Suppliers performance can be broadly judged in two categories:-

1- Qualitative performance: This is judged by the level of satisfaction of the person who is using it if the product is of good quality or not and end user is satisfied with the performance of product.

2- Quantitative performance: This can be judged if goods are being supplied on time and the response time of supplier

In order to keep track on the quality performance we have to closely monitor/compare the quality of different suppliers on same platform and in case of deviation the same should be brought to notice of the respective supplier.

In order to take care of quantitative performance we need to ensure the cycle time of completion of order which includes lead time for order processing , lead time to manufacture and the time of transaction from suppliers end to our premises.

Features: We need to understand there is a difference between quality and the feature. Features of any product are the basic requirement which is desired to complete production and quality is how effectively that product is adhering to those features.

So it is essential to make a checklist/description of features of each product and should be given to suppliers with a zero percentage deviation clause and same should be monitored through QC.

Reliability: As a supplier chain management consultant we need to ensure the the product is reliable or not. There is an average performance period of a product, if the product start malfunctioning before that it is considered to be less reliable.

So we need to have the performance parameter of each product so that reliability of the products from different vendors can be monitored.

Conformance: Conformance of any product can be judged by the degree to which product design and operating chacterstics meet the standard.

We can check the conformance by the number of service calls made/service incdence to a particular supplier to repair of a particular product.

Durability: Durability of any product is its total life in financial as well as technical terms. We have to check that weather product has given output to desired financial value and on the same time we need to check weather it has met our technical requirement in terms of product life.

So we need to monitor the amount of use we got from the product before it has has been asked to replace.

Serviceability: This is very important dimension and it is judged by the lead time taken to attend a breakdown call, because in Automobile industry the production lines are interlinked so delay in attending breakdown call can not be afforded. Second part is the time taken to resolve the breakdown call or number of visits taken by a company to resolve a single breakdown call and third point is frequency of repetition of same kind of breakdown which reflects the competitiveness of service proviser.

So it is veruy essential to have a visit log separately for breakdowns.

Aesthetics: This tells us about the physical appearance of the product or how much sound it makes this is more of a subjective matter which can vary among individuals.

We should have some kind of parameter to check the amount of noise one product from different suppliers make and on the basis of that we can prefer one over another.

Perceived Quality: This is again based on the perception of individual. If product from a well-known brand performs at the level of a local supplier then it will be not considered a quality product as it is not justifying the brand image.

So it is necessary to check on the perceived quality as the product from a better brand is most likely to costlier than the local supplier so it’s quality has to be superior.