Web-Based Supplier Management
When it comes to supplier
management solutions, Supplier*Stream from MetricStream
is at the high end of the available offerings. Astonishingly
flexible and completely Web-based, it can be tailored to
your supplier quality process. This may sound like an obvious
point, but many competing products don't give you the same
flexibility.
Supplier*Stream works much the way you would expect, with
a shop floor worker, for instance, discovering a problem
and generating a defective material report. A notice is
automatically sent to the supplier quality engineer, who
reviews the report and decides on a course of action, say,
an internal corrective action report or supplier corrective
action. Whoever is responsible for working on the corrective
action—including the supplier— does so following
the company's problem solving and corrective action process,
filling out the browser-based forms, with notifications
automatically handled by the product.
This is pretty standard stuff. The major selling point
of this type of software, however, is what it does with
the data. Supplier*Stream can present any kind of key performance
indicators such as PPM, cost of poor quality, defective
material events, number of corrective action reports written
and more. Reports unique to particular requirements (TL
9000, for example) can be created; these include the number
of problem reports, problem report response time, overdue
problem fix responsiveness and hardware return rates. Alarms
and notifications can be set for any condition. Performance
indicators are presented in a variety of different chart
forms that offer the ability to drill down through multiple
reports until you reach an individual part. Supplier*Stream
can also create cost-of-poor-quality reports based on material,
labor and transportation costs. These can be tracked by
location, division or product line with drill-down to the
part level.
Supplier*Stream and all of Quality* Stream's related modules
differentiate themselves from their competition by being
entirely browser-based. With the exception of the server
side installation, which includes the Oracle database server,
Supplier*Stream and a Web server, there's no need to install
software. All setup and configuration, reports, dashboards,
forms and the like are accessed via a standard Web browser.
The obvious advantage is that anybody can do anything with
the product from any location with Web access. A possible
downside for companies that communicate with remote sites
via the Internet is that the large amount of data being
transmitted makes some pages, particularly dashboards, slow
to load. This particular issue is addressed by installing
Supplier*Stream servers at each remote site and synchronizing
the databases over the Internet every evening.
Initial setup by MetricStream takes about a day. Later
changes to the process flow are accomplished via a nifty
Web-based flowcharting application. Although Supplier*Stream
is based on an Oracle database server and all product information
(e.g., part numbers, associated assemblies, suppliers, customers)
reside on that server, there's no need to maintain this
information separately. Supplier*Stream will dynamically
link to your existing ERP system and pull all required information.
Supplier*Stream is fully compliant with 21 CFR part 11,
a strict set of rules governing electronic signatures and
the traceability of electronic actions. Even if you aren't
required to comply with this rule, the benefit is that Supplier*Stream
provides a history report that shows all movement of, and
changes to, records. So, it's almost impossible for an unscrupulous
manager to "cook" reports or for the original
intent or scope of a report to be lost, even after it has
been highly edited.
Aside from some minor problems, which MetricStream quickly
resolved, our biggest issue is that the user interface isn't
always intuitive. Screens and dashboards aren't always clearly
labeled, and it's possible to get lost in the navigation.
MetricStream is currently addressing this issue, improving
forms layout and providing more uniform labeling for dashboards,
reports and forms.
The average price for Supplier*Stream ranges from about
$36,000 for a small installation to around $250,000 for
a large install. If you're a small company, there are less
expensive, albeit less flexible, products that will probably
meet your needs. If you do choose to have MetricStream demo
this product for you, have the rep show you how to create
custom reports similar to what you would use, show the types
of key performance indicators that are critical to your
operation, demonstrate the ability to adapt the supplier
management process flow to your rules, discuss realistic
return on investment and demonstrate the ability to link
to your existing system.
Dirk Dusharme is Quality Digest's technology editor. Letters
to the editor regarding this piece can be e-mailed to letters@qualitydigest.com.
|
