Part 3 - The Ugly: Communicating Quality Requirements to your Suppliers QB

 

The Ugly:

 

When quality requirements have not been communicated to your supplier, and quality requirements have also not been communicated to the auditor. This results in an audit that cannot show whether quality requirements have or have not been met. Example: The auditor is using a checklist based on ISO 9001 and several company-specific requirements. Most of the items on the checklist are quality requirements. However, several items are not requirements but simply information gathering. However, they have not been labeled differently. Perhaps an item asks whether samples of finished products are retained, but this is not a requirement – the company merely wants to know. This results in one of two scenarios: The auditor rigorously follows the checklist and calls for corrective action on items that are not requirements. Or the auditor realizes that some of the items are only informative and so does not rigorously follow the checklist, instead substituting his own judgment for the company’s actual quality requirements and not calling for corrective action on items that may, in fact, be quality requirements. Either way, quality requirements have not been successfully communicated to the supplier at the audit level.

 

What is Needed:

 

To ensure supply chain quality, a company has to know what its quality requirements are and communicate those to the supplier. If communication breaks down here, the quality requirements need to be communicated to the auditor, for a second chance to communicate with the supplier – at the audit level. If communication also breaks down here, supply chain quality gets ugly.