Supplier Quality Review
Suppliers build what you meant, first time, and pay when they don’t
A Supplier Quality Review is a structured quality review with a supplier who keeps getting it wrong. We cost their failures from your own records beforehand, trace where they start in the hand-off between you, and agree numbered actions written up the same day. Most supplier errors start partly with our own order, so the purchase order is reviewed as well as the supplier.
Best when: A critical supplier keeps getting it wrong, and every complaint starts from scratch.
What you get
- A joint quality review with a critical supplier.
- The failures that matter, traced to where they start in the hand-off between you.
- Numbered actions, agreed and written up the same day, so nothing depends on memory.
- Your own purchase orders checked for the specials that keep going wrong: handing, finish, edging, fitting packs.
- A route to recover the cost when a supplier gets it wrong, instead of absorbing it.
Sounds like your business?
- A critical supplier keeps delivering parts or materials that cause problems downstream.
- Every complaint to that supplier starts from scratch as though the last one never happened.
- You suspect the problem is as much your own specification or goods-in process as it is theirs.
- Supplier claims get refused and the cost is absorbed, because there is no agreed way to charge it back.
- The relationship has become adversarial and neither side wants to be the first to concede.
- Goods-in inspection is doing work that should not be necessary.
What it needs from you
- A supplier willing to attend a joint session, even reluctantly.
- Your records of what went wrong, enough to cost the failures credibly.
- Someone from your side who can agree a specification change without going away to consult.
- Willingness to hear that part of the cause sits on your side of the hand-off.
How it works
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Diagnose
Before the review, we cost the supplier's failures from your own records.
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Engineer
In the review, we agree what changes on both sides of the hand-off.
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Prove
We track the numbered actions to closure, and close nothing until the data says it worked.
What each stage involves
- Diagnose
- Before meeting the supplier, we cost their failures from your records: the returns, the rework, the site visits, the credits. This matters because it changes the conversation. A supplier facing "you keep getting it wrong" will defend; a supplier facing the actual cost of specific failures, drawn from your own paperwork, tends to engage. We arrive with the evidence, not a grievance.
- Engineer
- The review itself is a joint session, with both businesses present, working through the failures that actually matter and tracing each to the point in the hand-off where it starts. This is the step that surprises people: most recurring supplier problems begin at a boundary where each side assumed the other was checking something. Neither party is usually at fault: the specification was unclear, or the inspection responsibility was never agreed.
- Prove
- The output is numbered actions, agreed in the room and written up the same day, so there is no version that drifts in memory afterwards. Actions are allocated to one side or the other with a date. We track them to closure and check the failure rate actually fell. A closed action that did not reduce the defects is not a closed action, and we will say so.
What this service is not
- Not a supplier audit against a standard, with a score and a certificate.
- Not a renegotiation of price or terms. Recovering the cost of a supplier’s failures is in scope; the commercial deal is not.
- Not a way to build a case for replacing a supplier without first giving them the review.
Who runs this
Karl Pallister
~20 years in quality management, including building a QEHS team as production grew 30% a year
Proof it works
See the measured results behind this work: doubled assembly output, quote turnaround cut from 150 minutes to 15, and more.
Find out what your rework really costs.
Start with a free Margin Leak Review: about an hour, on a sample of your own rework or remedial records. If there's a fit, we agree the scope before any work starts.
Free. About an hour. You keep the findings.