Improving Supplier Communication
Philip Zollinger
Challenging the Status-Quo | Founder EVOCEAN GmbH | Co-Founder Silverbush AG - appreci8 | appculture 🗣 Business Culture & Employee Experience | Data-Driven Insights | Digital Transformation, Collaboration & Adoption
Easy lossless Exchange and Feedback of Specifications
Product Development and systems engineering is becoming ever more complex. Manufacturers are relying more and more on suppliers to achieve their goals to launch innovative, reliable products faster to market. Effective communication and collaboration on the specifications is key in making these supplier relationships successful.
Currently a lot of exchange is through documents and/or spreadsheets. However when dealing with many suppliers and getting feedback it can be a very cumbersome and error prone process leading not only to misunderstandings, but also delays and false interpretations and thus many additional and costly feedback loops.
How can this be improved with better structure, clearer communication and helping both sides to be more systematic and simpler?
The biggest challenge is that the solution needs to be easy to use and communicate clearly for the purchaser as well as for the sales people on the supplier side without much training (we allowed for a 15 minute training effort). Further, any commercial solution also needs to be easy to handle from a licencing point of view (internally for the Purchasers and externally for the involved suppliers.) And last but not least the process of how the specifications are communicated between the internal R&D having the "Master" record and the purchasing department (and back again) needs to be clear, systematic and easy. The process should also allow to shield certain information if need for any reason.
We have found and implemented a better way with a customer of ours who is building a very innovative mechatronics system. The new technologies involved in the system are driving them in finding further the right new suppliers. As such the exchange of the technical needs need to be as clear and easy as possible to make the process as easy as possible.
The general flow can be seen in the diagram hereafter.
What is important is that all information is contained in one data file. This xml based file is structured similar to an excel file but allows full traceability and structured comments.
The feedback from the customer has been overwhelmingly positive and all suppliers, even if reluctant at the beginning are seeing the benefits of using the structured way. Further, the learning goals and needed training of less than 15 minutes have been met. The suppliers recognise the clear and structured way which has improved better understanding, commenting and more effective communication.
The only issue we had was the licencing model at the beginning inherent to the baseline tool involved. However, this was completely changed into a model which for the customer is very easy to handle and minimises the overhead to an absolute minimum. This was driven by our goals that any tool needs be able to be used without having IT admin concerns (which Purchasers or suppliers do not allow to get into their way.
As a result the introduction of this solution helped to reduce admin overhead substantially and at the same time making the communication more clearer and the exchange much more effective, for both sides.
As a result we are hearing from suppliers of our customer: “Vow – this is awesome”.
For more information download our whitepaper on this subject or get in touch with us, such that we can present the solution in more detail and elaborate how this could improve your supplier relations.
Management Consultant, Systems Engineer and Enterprise Architect
1yYes, Philip, it is common practice to exchange Specification files (best as ReqIF, indeed). The car industry has been doing it for many years - still rarely in perfection, though ;-). In future, we will see the following trends: - Specifications are not any more exchanged using files, but access is given to a commonly used collaboration environment (hosted in the cloud or in a DMZ). As a customer, I can give access to individuals or organizations ... and revoke it at any time. A collaboration partner can access any piece of published information, but it requires a certain effort to retrieve (or steal) the complete data set. - Also, collaboration is more and more based on models with linked requirements. The IREB has seen the value of using models in addition to hierarchical requirement lists for quite a while, and now it is slowly seen in practice. (I am talking about 'real' models, not just model diagrams.) In any case, every step up in maturity must be taken one by one and your support to organizations is very important ... still by far too many organizations are still using office files ... OD.