Business Disruption

The ASQ recently added a new test for Certified Supplier Quality Professional. Intrigued I signed up to take the exam and read the book and after having passed the exam I reflected on what I learned. It was good basic supply chain management practices with the focus on understanding the basics of supply management and compliance.

So, in my dealings with major disruptions in business, up to the aircraft production level, I have a unique perspective regarding supply chain management and the shortcomings of managing such complex issues in high tech environments. And that view is not so much what we are doing incorrectly, because what is being taught in Quality Supply Chain Management is not wrong, it is just not enough.

Let me frame my critical view within the context of AS9145's expectations. For those of you who have not immersed yourselves in the complex requirements of AS9145, let me just say it is a wonderful framework of goals and activities Aerospace companies should undertake in the pursuit of building proven processes in the design, development and delivery of product to customers. In it there are clear objectives and deliverables for the 5 major phases of product development and delivery, but only one established criteria for process capability. At first it seems strange that only Cpk is established as a criteria and the other necessary deliverables like DFMEA, PFMEA and MSA have no criteria defined. In a sense, this comes as no surprise because there are no industry standards established for these tools, only that they be applied and there in lies the rub.

How can we expect IPT team members like Supply Managers and Supplier Quality Professionals to know how to manage these new requirements if we don't establish appropriate performance levels for them. This is a difficult task for any organization and that is why the most we can expect right now is just compliance measures. Did we check the box? Did the supplier provide the PFMEA and the Control Plan? These are great questions, but more importantly is the question of how well were they completed and how do we know? Usually it is a team consensus and we are hopeful the team is applying HOT (Higher Order Thinking). So, there is no wonder that we get surprised when a major supplier, doing the right things, has a failure that halts production and ripples through the entire supply chain.

The new era of Quality Professionals must therefore be capable of not only assessing the quality level of things such as the AS9145 deliverables, they must be fluent in knowing the risks inherent the activities that build such deliverables and be capable of mitigating those risks with the suppliers. That also leads to a new way of looking at a suppliers capability. Gone are the days of supplier ratings that lag the product delivery. New predictive models must look to monetary and capacity risks as well as technical agility in accomplishing the key phases of product development, delivery and post delivery. Advanced risk models and higher order thinking is therefore required. Everything goes back to Blooms taxonomy. If your team is stuck in the LOT (Lower Order Thinking) levels the key question is how to pull them up to Higher Order Thinking. I am purposely using the verb pull. The goal for the Quality professional must therefore be to apply the Higher Order Thinking to Supply Management so that you lower the probability of disruptions and have the measures and confidence it is working in a closed loop fashion. More to come in upcoming articles on "Root Cause Analysis".