Industry Expertise
QMSC Founder Marshall Williams discusses industry specific case studies of customers in Automotive, Oil and Gas, Aerospace, and Consumer Products.
00:00 Automotive
One of our customers in automotive has more than 500 suppliers, less than a thousand, so it's a decent sized supply base.
Before QMSC, they used about three different ways to to manage and track their non-conformances. We did a time study on it - from the time that that someone identified there was an issue to the time it got sent to an SQE, our study showed it took an hour and 20 minutes for the customer to create a non-conformance report.
Which is just mind-boggling because it meant that they're spending over 30 hours a day writing up non-conformances… there's so many other things that they could be working on. After QMSC, it took them on average between 5 to 8 minutes to to do all of that, and in fact, we actually do more because all of the other things that happened after it got sent to an SQE - all of that happens in the background with with QMSC.
It’s really remarkable that they're able to do that, and because of the kind of data that we can provide them with that goes into their business intelligence platform, they really understand very clearly where the issues are down to part families, which suppliers are the top offending suppliers, where their supplier quality team needs to go focus and spend time working on developing with remediation on different suppliers so there's a lot of things that we can give them clarity on that they just weren't able to extract it previously.
All of that happens either in our application or in their business intelligence application using the data our software is making it easy to collect.
03:40 Oil & Gas
We have another customer in oil and gas, and prior to QMSC they were using excel spreadsheets and that was an inhibiting or a limiting factor for them to be able to record non-conformances or incidents. This created a lot of constraints within their businesses that prevented them from understanding where the problems existed because people just weren't recording the problems.
In the two years previous to implementing QMSC they recorded less than 200 non-conformances, total. After implementing QMSC, of course, all of their team members were able to log on concurrently so all of their team members can now get onto the system at the same time and do whatever kind of reporting they need to do whenever they identify a problem. And with our oil and gas customer, within the first year they recorded 800 non-conformances and so it really kind of made them wonder what happened in the two years previous.
I think that's one of the things that really speaks to the reasons why you should be implementing a solution like QMSC - because you don't know what you don’t know and there's a lot of things that go on your business you just don't have any clue about and one of the values of this particular case study was just that all of the stuff was happening in the “hidden factory”, as we call it, there's this entire series of things that people do to try and fix problems that go completely unnoticed - did they do it the right way? Did it really go through the right checks and balances? You don't know - you hope so.
After our oil and gas customer implemented QMSC - they were able to identify these hidden problem areas and they were able to identify, for instance, that they had a lot of problems around engineering that led to a complete overhaul of their engineering group. Now they've identified other areas that they need to go work on just part of continuous improvement - with QMSC, it's very easy to understand where your problems exist today.
07:15 Aerospace
One of the challenges in aerospace and defense contracting is is that there are some very specific gates that you have to go through when you do identify some kind of problem with the supplier or with a product. For every single incident, customers want you to identify the root cause. It's very laborious, very time intensive but because the safety implications are so large, it’s really really critical to understand what is the root cause for this problem with this particular part any related parts and so that's one of the things that we have baked into our solution for aerospace and defense contracting.
With one of our aerospace customers that we implemented a few years ago, they were having difficulties, and in fact were at risk of losing one of their customers, because they failed to follow the process every single time. Now they implemented QMSC, they didn't have any way around it - every single non-performance had to go through the right gates in order to be closed out and so that's one of the advantages of having a dedicated solution rather than trying to do it on excel spreadsheets or in some kind of web document or something like that.
You can add in the automation, and i think one of the great things about our platform is that our customer admins can make all of the little tweaks and adjustments that they need to over time without having to call us up and say “hey can we change this?”. Absolutely we can change it for them or they can change it too and and so they can manage their own their own requirements as they identify those needs for their business and account for those nuances.
In this case study, we were able to help them keep that customer because they implemented a process that could not be deviated from which is really really critical in aerospace and defense and also with consumer goods and especially luxury goods.
10:09 Consumer Products
I was actually surprised that is such a huge the need in the consumer goods space - but after working with a new customer in the space, it makes a lot of sense because requirements for the products that these customers deliver are extremely high. They value their reputation in the marketplace and in some cases, there are regulations that relate to consumer protections. One of the challenges our customer had was that they collected masses of massive amounts of data, and so imagine for a moment you've got four director level people who, every month, (I’m not exaggerating) each spends about 40 hours a month looking at all of this data, making sure that they're hitting their KPIs, that they don't have any processes going out of control because quality is so critical to them. 160 hours a month for these directors, and in addition they also had two data analysts who are supporting those by going back, checking things ,evaluating problems that may have been identified in the reports with metrics - so you've got two people dedicated to that plus another individual at director levels full-time three people all dedicated just to looking at reports and raw data.
It’s just mind-boggling inefficiency, but that's how serious they were about about their quality. One of the things that we were able to do within a few months of implementing is was to essentially eliminate that time. All they have to do at this point is export a single file from their ERP, they drop it into our application and we do all of the data scrubbing. We do all the error checking. They're able to look at these dashboards and it doesn't take them a month to do it - it's probably half an hour to export the data and upload it, and it's one person doing that. They've saved an incredible amount of time and we're preventing errors in the data that they weren't even aware of previously because we have our own built-in analytics and we can run algorithms to make sure that all of this stuff is the way that it's supposed to be.
That's one of the things that I think QMSC is really good at and we're finding a lot of our market fit is the analytics because it matters to a lot of people being data driven making data-driven decisions and you can't do that whenever it takes you an entire month to collect all that information, check it, and then finally be able to look at a report. We help all of our customers with improving their data-driven quality processes across their supply chain.
Summary Transcript
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