Situation
Director of Quality, Golf Ball Division, Acushnet (Titleist & Footjoy) Company.
Critical issue
The company had no way of knowing which suppliers were providing good quality, good service, or good on-time delivery. They lacked good answers to important questions. They could only react to the last thing a supplier did, without consideration of the entire history of the relationship.
Reason
The company had no formal supplier rating program. Supplier decisions were based on the last experience with that supplier, and even influenced by which supplier offered the best perks – Red Sox tickets, golf rounds, and so forth.
Vision
The company wanted a supplier improvement program to objectively track and develop supplier performance. The new program would be objective (data driven), based on entire relationship history, easy to manage, and easy to maintain. This would level the playing field among suppliers, and enable the company to develop their suppliers and inspire them to higher levels of performance. The new program should improve communications with the entire supplier organization, including the CEO.
Hertzler Systems provided
The company was a long-time customer of Hertzler Systems’ GainSeeker Suite, and was already tracking golf ball production quality data. With very little effort the company began tracking raw material and supplier data. They married this to the existing production data and now have a method to easily collect, warehouse, analyze, and report supplier data.
Results
The company now tracks supplier quality for the top 80% of their purchasing dollars. They send out 31 reports each quarter to the CEOs (and their staff) of their supplier companies. GainSeeker plays an import role: “We put all our raw material data into GainSeeker by Hertzler. It gives us everything we want to know, when we want to know it… We can get it over any time period we want. We can break it down by any traceability factor we want. It really really helps us out. We can do anything we want with this database.”
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