“IQDP: The Challenge of the Development Area to Evaluate its Suppliers” 2001-01-3975

In the work presented to SAE in 1999: IQTC: a Practical and Unified Index to Evaluate the Continuous Improvement of Suppliers, we showed that the Development Area is one of the chapters inserted into the evaluation process of suppliers and answers for an evaluation called IQDP (Quality Index in Product Development).

The present work objective is to show the difficulties found in the implementation, solutions and improvements that are being used to outline a better supplier evaluation.

Such a control within a universe of 350 suppliers (directly connected to production) being evaluated by 400 persons, in a natural process, is not an easy task.

Collecting information about the difficulties faced to evaluate a supplier and the supplier claims to obtain an answer in reply to the attributed scores, took us to the search of the adequate computerized technology that would allow us to group the interests of work methods that would comply with the diverse demands involved. This new tool, which will be shown in detail in the work, combines the facility to select the persons who are authorized to evaluate, the suppliers they can evaluate, with the work following a responsibility hierarchy, and in this case nobody authorizes the score publication without having the knowledge of how the scores were outlined and of the scores themselves that were attributed to the suppliers.

One of the strongest claims from the suppliers is related to the identification of the evaluator and how to discuss the attributed score. In the new system we searched for the most adequate and quick communication means to inform the suppliers and this is the Internet. The suppliers will be given a password that will allow them to access the information pertinent to their company and who were the persons attributing the scores and the means to contact them. The new software innovates with one of the quickest and most transparent evaluation and publication tools.

The whole work of improving the evaluation carried out today aims at the preparation of action plans to check what the suppliers are doing to improve their scores and the products being developed, both in terms of time and quality, allowing us a much wider universe of suppliers working as our partners.

This work showed the other side of the coin, which refers to the problems within the development area, hidden by a conservative vision, leading suppliers to a non-efficient attendance of our product requests and to the development of an impersonal tool to break down barriers and consequently aiming at the main target involving a better quality product in a shorter period of time. Time that depends both on the Client and on the Supplier.