Improve Supplier Performance

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

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.

Solumina’s Supplier Quality Assurance functionality can be used by itself or coupled with other Solumina quality management functions like work instructions and tooling management. The Solumina suite of software solutions provides a comprehensive quality management solution for your organization.

Product Characteristics and Specifications

Solumina includes a library for all product characteristic specifications, inspection requirements, and rules for sampling, oversight and audit. These dynamic inspection requirements are dispatched over the web to the supplier site for each Purchase Order. 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 characteristics. Characteristic specifications can be set at hierarchal levels with the following override capabilities:

• General
• Part Family Specific
• Part Number Specific
• Supplier/Part Number Specific

Measurement characteristics can have upper and lower spec limits.

Sampling Plans

Each measurement or observation characteristic is assigned a sampling plan that determines the frequency and sample size for each inspection. Characteristics that are considered Critical will cause 100% of all associated parts to be sampled and inspected. Characteristics that are Minor will 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 failure history. Characteristics with no issues gradually receive less attention while trouble spots receive more scrutiny.