Research On Supply Chain Quality Management In Auto Parts Companies

A supply chain consists of all parties involved,directly or indirectly,in fulfilling a customer request.The supply chain includes not only the firm,but also all suppliers and customers.Within each firm,such as a manufacturer of automobile industry,the supply chain includes all functions involved in receiving and fulfilling a customer request.These functions included,but are not limited to,marketing,new product development,procurement,operations,logistics,distributions,and customer service.The supply chain members of the automobile industry include car manufacturers,parts suppliers,transporters,distributors,end consumers and other stakeholders.The overall competitiveness of supply chain members determines the competitiveness of enterprises and enterprises.The income and cost of each member of the supply chain have a significant impact on the success or failure of each firm.The increasing international competition in quality has raised quality management to the priority of firms.In recently years,a large number of recalls due to product quality problems often result in a huge loss of firms.It is estimated that the cost of poor quality caused by product failure in manufacturing industry accounted for 15%-20% of sales in2003(Juran and De Feo,2010).S company,as an auto parts supplier,the annual quality cost was also more than 10% of sales before improvement.Therefore,it is of great practical significance to study how to improve the level of product quality,reduce the total cost through efficient supply chain quality management.This paper puts forward the objectives,strategies and methods of quality management based on supply chains,analyzes how to cooperate with customers and suppliers to carry out effective quality management activities,so as to provide high-quality products and services and quickly respond to the needs of the market and customers.Taking S company as an example,this paper studies and analyzes the main problems existing in the quality management activities of S company before improvement,mainly including: 1.Long design and development cycle of new products;2.Many complaints from customers;3.High defect rate of products in the production process;4.High defect rate of products from suppliers.At the same time,the paper studies the management strategies and methods adopted by S company after improvement,as well as the performance of the key indicators achieved after improvement(on-time delivery rate,delivered product defect rate,internal product defect and scrap rate,supplier product defect rate,etc.compared with status before improvement).From the perspective of practice,the supply chain quality management theory proposed in this study is verified by the case study.In order to improve the overall quality management level of supply chain,reduce the total cost and improve the competitiveness,more firms are recommended to use this study for reference.