Improve Supplier Performance

Supplier performance management is critical to controlling production costs, reducing variance, and protecting the quality standards associated with the brand name.

Solumina provides the capability to query real-time supplier status, constraints, and history records for all processes and activities related to product quality and production history. Graphs and reports include inspections, supplier ratings, DPPM, and discrepancies.

Solumina enables a self-managed quality path for suppliers, which increases awareness and ownership of process strengths and weaknesses. The collaborative quality system provides the supplier with an easy to use tool to help diagnose which processes need the most attention.

Product Features

Solumina’s Supplier Quality Assurance functionality can be used by itself or coupled with other Solumina quality management functions used to manage internal production operations. The Solumina suite of software solutions provides a comprehensive quality management solution for your organization.

Product Key Characteristics and Specifications

Solumina provides organization and management tools to develop a library of product specifications, process specifications, inspection requirements, and rules for sampling, oversight and audit. These dynamic inspection and verification requirements are dispatched over the web to the supplier site for each purchase order line item. All inspection data collection is recorded in Solumina and can be used to determine which areas need to be enhanced, and which suppliers require additional oversight or corrective action.

Inspection Planning

Solumina provides a central location for the authoring and maintenance of inspection requirements for product key characteristics and verifications for process requirements including handling, labeling and packaging. Characteristic measurement requirements include upper and lower spec limits and sampling rules. Inspection and verification specifications can be set at hierarchal levels with the following override capabilities:

• Standard Requirement Group
• Part Family Specific
• Part Number Specific
• Supplier/Part Number Specific

Sampling Plans

Each measurement or observation characteristic is assigned a sampling plan that determines the frequency and sample size for each inspection. For example, characteristics that are considered critical can cause 100% of all associated parts to be sampled and inspected. Characteristics considered minor can cause a smaller percentage of parts to be sampled and inspected.

Each sampling plan can optionally include switching logic that defines rules for automatically switching to a tighter or more relaxed sampling plan based on recorded failure history. Inspection items or characteristics with no issues gradually receive less attention while trouble spots receive more scrutiny.