15 November 2010: Stephan Sprink

Manufacturers have to face a tough competitive situation, an increasing number of product variants and quite often reduced product life cycles. Due to these facts, they start to focus on their core competences and reduce their own depth of added value. They are able to compensate this new trend by moving the focus of the added value chain from manufacturer to supplier who, instead of just being a classical supplier, becomes more and more an expert on components and systems. Numerous product recalls show the importance of having supplier quality information available in time and of integrating them into the QM system. It becomes even more important to have a transparent quality status of all upstream processes in order to be able to react to variations in quality in time and to investigate the causes of these variations. The responsibility for supplied parts and components is closely associated with traceability.

This article shows different approaches illustrating how Q-DAS supports you in designing a comprehensive quality information system even including supplier quality information. Each approach has a different level of integration and is based on different Q-DAS licenses.

1. Sending reports including quality information
2. Transferring data between supplier and manufacturer
3. Exchanging data between supplier and manufacturer in real time
4. Recording data based on a web application
5. Using a web application for evaluations