Quality vs. Supply Chain: A Love/Hate/Love Relationship

You know I love to hate the Quality Department, not because they are bad people or that they are bad at their job, but because they always give the supply chain department bad news.  

I talk to the guys and gals in quality all the time, but they only come to me with bad news. One of my good friends Alex came up to me and tells me “Bad news, Supplier X’s product does not meet the tolerances.”

At this, I ususally go into a defensive posture and ask “what’s the issue?” He goes into his spiel, and I find that it is really not as bad as I was thinking or as bad as he was indicating. 

What I came to discover is that the product is usable, but only slightly out of tolerance and all we need is a waiver from the customer. So I assigned a couple of folks to help his team out with fixing the issue (long term), but why could he not have said we have a small issue? I think what bothers be so much is the pure black and white vision of quality folks. Just once I would like to hear a quality person say “Mike, good news, all of your suppliers are great!” Pipe dream maybe, but it sure would be nice.

With all of that said, the quality organization is a huge asset to anyone in supply chain, but we rarely think of them as such. In order to combat this, I schedule a weekly meeting with the Quality Director just to align priorities and goals. Sometimes it’s a short meeting, but others are very long and sometimes heated. All in all the meetings are good to help us communicate better, discuss issues, and to understand what projects we need resources on. 

All in all, I really rely on the quality group! I don’t often say this, but they really help to identify issues, help solve issues and ensure we have good products.