Do you sometimes feel that your company, your suppliers, and their own suppliers, are on different planets? Information spreads with difficulty through your supply chain?
Nothing unique here. It is quite typical if you work with suppliers in China, Vietnam, India, etc.
I wrote about this in The Impact of Quality Control Software on Your Supply Chain, on the SynControl blog, and we illustrated it in this infographic:
Every step in the supply chain tries to optimize its own situation. There are serious breakdowns in the transmission of information. There is nearly no feedback loop, no followup on improvement, and in the long run it means mediocre performance.
We also drew this vision of a much better setup, with a particular emphasis on QC inspections (hey, that’s our line of work).
Software is not enough. Obviously the importer needs to negotiate a certain level of visibility and access to the critical sub-suppliers, and needs the exporting factory to be open about their internal processes.
It also requires some good communication within the buying organization. If no department pays any attention to the issues and and tries to improve, all this is pretty much useless.
Does it make sense?