Resource Quest, Inc.                    

Business Process Improvement

Situation: 

• Current process for delivery of purchased material to manufacturing results in late deliveries from suppliers 70% of the time causing missed customer delivery dates. 

• Engineering complains of long lead times.

• Manufacturing complains of poor quality and late parts.  

• Purchasing is paying high shipping costs to get parts when needed for customer orders. 

 Solution: 

• Researched and documented main causes of late deliveries with cross-functional team comprised of manufacturing, engineering quality and purchasing.  

• Developed system reports to track supplier performance and cause of late deliveries by commodity and supplier.  

• Instituted regular meetings with suppliers and team to review performance and implement process improvements.  

Result:    

• Key supplier performance improved to 90% on time delivery while achieving 23% to 34% annual savings in cost of materials.  

• Instituted cross-functional procedures to support processes to sustain continuous improvement.