Zymark raises the bar on supplier scorecard goals
By Elena E Murphy -- Purchasing, 5/7/1998
There's no time for Zymark suppliers to rest on their laurels. At the company's annual supplier technology fair, it announced even more rigorous metrics for suppliers to achieve in 1998. The move comes one year after the Hopkinton, Mass.-based robotics and lab testing equipment manufacturer rallied its supply base to meet monthly performance goals.In 1997, the company launched a scorecard to measure supplier performance in quality, delivery, information accuracy, and value-added service, says Tom Buckland, corporate sourcing manager. The first three metrics are each worth 30%; the remaining 10% goes to value-added services, including performance measurements for such areas as technical support, customer focus, and agility.
Metrics for 1998 reflect Zymark's intention to expand to $100 million in sales without sacrificing quality. For example, incoming product can register no more than 2,000 defects per million over the course of a month, compared to 20,000 defects acceptable just last year, says Jack Pinkerman, senior supplier engineer. He adds that on-time supplier delivery rates within a two-day window must now reach a minimum of 90% rather than the 80% required in 1997.
Zymark also is using the scorecard to identify and solve problems. For example, tests showed that one supplier's products were arriving damaged. The supplier matched the results with tests at its plant and discovered that shipping methods were to blame. Isolating the problem enabled the supplier to find a solution more rapidly. The supplier wrote up a corrective-action plan to document its solution. Any supplier that exhibits performance discrepancies submits a similar plan and must meet Zymark's metric goals before the following month's scorecard. The cost of not correcting problems: the possibility of losing Zymark's business.
To assist its suppliers during last year's transition to the scorecard, Zymark brought in select groups of suppliers after the technology fair to hammer out working plans to achieve scorecard performance goals. Buckland says that due to the scorecard, Zymark's supplier product quality has dropped from 20,000 defects per million to fewer than 2,000/million. On-time supplier delivery jumped from 32% to 87%, and instances of inaccurate information are down from 150/month to fewer than ten.
Buckland says suppliers are certified based on the scorecard, which draws attention to what they are doing right and where they can improve. Commodity suppliers that fail to implement corrective-action plans run the risk of being let go since their products are replaceable.
Change inside and out
Buckland says Zymark has changed as well. Last year, Zymark president and CEO Kevin Hrusovsky an-nounced that the company would cut product cycles by 2-3 times, a goal that has been achieved based on a pull inventory system and reconfigured work cells. Pinkerman also points out that the company has reduced machining capacity and increasingly chooses contract manufacturing.
Zymark's new emphasis on outsourcing has challenged suppliers to redefine their roles in the supply base. Certain suppliers have emerged in new roles as contract manufacturers, adding value and enabling Zymark to reduce its tier-one supply base. An example is Debco Machine, Natick, Mass. The shop now arranges for castings to be painted and has certain components built into them before it ships to Zymark. Debco's general manager Ted Donnelly says that by communicating with another supplier, such as a foundry, Debco can schedule more accurately than when Zymark acted as liaison between the two suppliers. Suppliers say the tech fair itself improves communication within the supply base. Contract manufacturers such as Mike Cunningham, director of engineering for Granite State Manufacturing, Manchester, N.H., say they're more inclined to discuss the possibility of doing business with a supplier in this group since the firms already have systems in place to meet Zymark's metrics.
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