Disruption is a funny thing. You see it coming—kind of—but it’s hard to tell what it means. Back in the day, would you have foreseen the shift from taxis to Uber? Would you have predicted that HVAC units would be offered as a service rather than purchased as a product? These disruptive changes and many more were driven through use of the cloud, connectivity, machine learning, and mobile apps as important technologies that enabled digital transformation and the industrial internet of things (IIoT).

These changes took established markets by surprise, which can be defined as “an unexpected or astonishing event, fact, or thing”—something that established wisdom and the consensus view didn’t anticipate.

Today, would you predict that some of those same technologies, when applied to supplier quality management (SQM), will result in disruption within the next few years? It’s possible to argue that they can and likely will; to argue that SQM is important enough to disrupt markets, the market’s adoption of SQM is immature enough to make industry ripe for disruption, and that innovative SQM provides substantial competitive advantage.

 …