|
Quality Management projects are always interesting, and full of surprises and learning!
A few weeks ago, one of our clients from the Middle-East contracted us to do Supplier Management and Pre-shipment Inspection for a racking system to be produced by his supplier in Nanjing. In order to make a good inspection, we first discussed carefully with our client and the supplier about the Quality Plan. The supplier provided us with their production plan and the quality tests to be performed. We prepared our on-site inspection schedule (4 visits in total) based on their plan.
But a few days later, the supplier started changing the production schedule and admitted they were not ready to do the tests as written in the agreed Quality Plan. They were always saying “we have the experience” or “we promise the parts will be OK”. But we soon realized that they were not following the Quality Plan at all:
 The beam painting inspection was a good example: According to the plan, they had to do 100% visual check of the paint for the beams (defective rate less than 1%). But the first lot of painted beams we inspected, the defective rate was over 10%! I believe they never did the inspection according to the plan. We required them to unpack the whole lot, sort beams with defective paint and replace them, then repack everything. Their attitude was good, though, and the Production Manager told me they will do what they needed to do and promised to me that we will not find a single defective part next time. Indeed, during the next inspection, we only found 0.5% parts with defective paint.
Another example: they had no warehouse for finished parts, and put the finished goods everywhere in the plant.
Each time we wanted to count the total quantity of the finished parts, we had to walk around the factory. It was not easy to count and control the quantity during the production and container loading! Then, we required them to collect all the parts for this project in the same area. Again, they followed our advice and the problem was solved.
All the problems we met during this project were due to poor organization. It was a young sales representative who was acting as Project Manager. She was the only point of contact for us with the company, but she had not enough power and knowledge to run the whole project properly. Although she worked very hard, she could not manage the production, quality inspection and packaging for the project. She could not provide us with the correct information at the different stages of the project…
At the end, after 6 visits on site, all problems were solved and we signed the inspection report. I believe the quality of the parts improved a lot. During the project, procurAsia advised the supplier on many points (organization, quality control, reports, and project management) and the supplier improved a lot.
This is the real value of procurAsia.
Paul Wang, April 2007
|
Send this article
