Why Supplier Quality Matters

Your quality starts outside your gate

Most organisations buy a large part of what they deliver. A manufacturer buys raw material, components, coatings, heat treatment and calibration. A construction contractor buys concrete, steel, equipment hire and specialist subcontract work. A service company buys software, transport and temporary staff. In many businesses, purchased goods and services are the biggest single share of cost.

Whatever you buy becomes part of what your customer receives. Your customer does not care whether a defect came from your process or your supplier's. They see one product and one name: yours. Supplier quality management is the set of activities that makes sure what you buy meets your requirements, consistently, at a sensible total cost.

Worked example 1: the cheap fastener

A pump manufacturer changes to a cheaper bolt supplier, saving a few cents per bolt. Six months later, bolts in a batch have low hardness, and three pumps leak at the customer's site. The cost of the field visits, replacement bolts for every pump built with that batch, and the customer's sorting charge is many times the annual saving. Price was measured carefully; quality risk was not measured at all.

Worked example 2: the service supplier

An engineering company subcontracts calibration of its gauges. The laboratory is cheap and fast. An audit later finds that it is not accredited for pressure calibration, and its reference standards are not traceable. Every pressure test certificate the company issued in the past year is now in doubt. A service supplier's quality became the company's own quality problem.