Quality management is at the heart of the customer experience—which makes it of primary interest to brand management teams everywhere. And even if compliance is the main focus, let’s not forget that failure to comply can represent tremendous risk to the business in terms of fines and reputational damage.

In other words, quality management is a big deal for the entire business—from the executive board to the shop floor. But when it comes to managing quality in the context of extended global supply chains, it’s often hard to keep pace. The challenge is twofold.

Process control

The first supply chain obstacle organizations face is gaining control over supply chain processes. Here, the critical need is to gain visibility along the entire the supply chain. Not that you need an employee on site where the silica is mined or the timber is harvested. Reaching upstream in a digitally connected world is more about collaboration and transparency. If you can work with your suppliers to communicate quality expectations and establish KPIs to measure performance, you can gain better process control from farm to fork, from mine to computer chip.

Through collaboration with your trading partners, you can work to together to maintain quality, prevent fraud, and back it all up with a digital paper trail to meet regulations and prove compliance.

Monitoring

The second supply chain obstacle is monitoring goods for quality as they move through the supply chain. At any point in the process, you want to be able to reach back across your multi-tier supply chain to gain transparency into product provenance and build a chain of trust for quick traceability when needed.

Real-time tracking of goods in motion is important, but so is the data and documentation associated with critical handoff points. If something goes wrong—salmonella in the romaine lettuce, faulty builds causing smartphones to overheat—you can identify the supplier of the raw material or component—through batch or serial number—and determine what other products may be affected.

But this requires robust genealogical capabilities. Relying on spreadsheets and email to get to the root of the problem may take a great deal of time, risking that the problem becomes more widespread, thereby negatively affecting customer satisfaction and corporate brand.

The network effect with SAP Business Network

At SAP, we understand the dilemma—which is why we built a business network, which has become the largest business-to-business commerce network in the world.

Being on the network means you can connect with the millions of trading partners share data and collaborate in real time. And the more partners you have on the network, the greater the network effect for your supply chain agility.

But where’s the quality?

Quality starts with supply chain collaboration tools designed for managing quality. You can send and receive quality notifications to and from your suppliers and work with them to address deviations during manufacturing. You can request and manage quality inspections and reviews at various points along the supply chain and share the results. And you can generate, receive, and store quality documentation needed for a digital paper trail – with complete data visibility and collaboration to address issues as they arise.

In addition, you can leverage the network for material traceability. Powerful blockchain capabilities help you maintain an irrefutable and tamper-proof chain of custody record that demonstrates where goods are and where they have been. This can help prove the provenance of materials for ethical sourcing, show compliance with sustainability requirements, and enforce quality standards with a full and up-to-date audit trail that can be reviewed for purposes of both internal improvement and external compliance.

What does this mean for your business?

Based on the experience of customers all over the world using this networked approach to quality management, you can expect to reduce FTE hours dedicated to quality management processes through automation and greater efficiency. You can also more readily extend your quality process to other stakeholders while reducing lead times, minimizing inventory carrying costs, and achieving higher and more consistent levels of quality.