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Product Overview

QMSC Founder Marshall Williams discusses QMSC's vision and business model plus provides an overview of Pulse in this video. 

00:00 Introduction

QMSC is the developer of a cloud-based software platform called Pulse. Pulse helps companies that operate in regulated industries such as automotive, aerospace, and oil & gas. We help our customers better manage their supplier quality from the point that they issue a purchase order and and even even before then to help them better evaluate potential suppliers that they may want to work with and understand what those suppliers capabilities are all the way through to the point that those suppliers are are delivering goods and services to them.

 

We provide our customers with clarity, better collaboration and speed as they engage with their supply chain to to understand which suppliers are best, which one needs remediation, and which suppliers deliver the best value.

 

Typical Challenges

Common problems for our customers are going to be:

  • manual and paper-based processes: a lot of our customers are actually operating with ad-hoc tools like paper, pdf and spreadsheets;

  • very transactional: think about emails going back and forth between your your purchasing team and your supplier quality team;

  • trying to extract all kinds of information about the the state of the product and finding it’s silo’d and fragmented data;

  • have some kind of certification or manufacturing process that’s required by their customers

  • can't extract meaningful information from their data

 

Those are some of the common challenges that i wanted to overcome, personally, when we launched QMSC because of frustrations throughout my career as a quality engineer.

 

What we’re doing is better speed and collaboration.

03:50 Business Model

QMSC is a is a cloud-based solution, with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model - so it’s a subscription model and the levers that we tend to pull our quotes from are:

  • number of internal users;

  • tiered access level - users who can log into the system and make changes within your organization are priced at a different rate than the number of supplier connections that you are working with in your supply chain who are external to your organization;

05:22 Supplier Quality Management

 

Pretty early on we found that aerospace was a great niche for us to be in. When i say aerospace i mean both aerospace and defense contracting. I started my career there so it’s something i'm very familiar with and and that’s one of the reasons there's such a great alignment with QMSC and our customers in aerospace and defense contracting.

The nature of how regulated these industries are, the technical requirements around things like paint coatings for example, can be very very very challenging in both those industries. There's lots of different nuances to that industry and and because those requirements are so challenging, you tend to see lots of supplier quality issues.

There's one going on with a very big aerospace company right now with carbon fiber and it's very public - everybody knows about it - so you see these things in daily life but the reason that we’re relevant is that we help our customers document those issues and begin to understand what the trends are across their supply chains with their particular products at certain suppliers because maybe one supplier is better than a different supplier.

 

We help our customers see those trends and to communicate with that supplier and collaborate with them through some industry standard and best practices. Ultimately, it’s about how we're going to eliminate that problem.

18:00 Nonconformance Management

The vast majority of issues that relate to a product or a supplier start when a purchase order is is sent to that supplier. The vast majority of time, the way that most suppliers and these big companies work is they’ve got a purchase they usually have to print out. It's a stack of papers and the suppliers just don't look through it very clearly to understand what all of those unique requirements are - and this results in a lot of quality problems across the supply chain. What our software does is give customers the ability to understand the hard and soft deliverables of a particular purchase order line item. For instance, if you wanted green on this line item and blue on this line item, this one has to have specific documentation from your supplier and maybe different documentation from the sub-supplier.

 

We can get down into that level of granularity whenever it comes to these purchase orders. As the supplier completes these requirements, they can actually attach the supplier to the purchase order line item so that whenever it comes in, all they have to do is go to QMSC, click on that purchase order line item and they see everything that they're looking for.

 

That's something that is very difficult to achieve in the marketplace right now because most companies don’t currently have a platform that integrates all of these other parts of your business data and that's where we're able to deliver a lot of efficiency and clarity both to the supplier and and to your internal quality team incident management.

22:58 Implementation and Roll-Out

With implementation, we tend to take a crawl-walk-run approach. There are several tools that we have found to be really effective in in rolling out the application and it depends on the size of the business. For a smaller business, we can do a lot of preparation work and do several training sessions and when i say small i mean if you've got 100 employees or something like that. Most of our customers are much larger than that though and so whenever we've got a large roll out that involves multiple departments and possibly hundreds or thousands of suppliers, there are a number of steps that you need to go through in order to get it right. You want to minimize any kind of downtime or negative impact and so what we tend to do is that that will get the configuration and the implementation 90-95 percent to where we think it needs to be and then we'll roll out with a pilot with a very small core dedicated group.

 

They'll help us evaluate the tools and the workflows and automation we’ve configured into the account and once we’ve been able to work through any kind of challenges or anything that we've identified as needing some refinement, then we'll begin to go group by group internally, deploying QMSC and training each group of users to ensure a successful implementation for our customers.

Summary Transcript

QMSC Video Series

QMSC Product Demo
QMSC Industry Expertise
QMSC Product Overview
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Ready to make your supply chain work for your business again? 

Learn more about how our cloud-based, supplier quality management software can revolutionize your supply chain. 

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