Solutions for Managing the Plastics Supply Chain

Moldmakers and molders have always been in the business of implementing procedures to improve acceptable quality levels required by customers. These include managing the plastics supply chain by knowing your clients' markets and customers, helping your customer's engineers and buyers when they are outsourcing manufacturing, understanding design and total cost of ownership versus individual part/component price, and being your customer's plastics professional partner serving the supply chain--tooling, process, materials and servicing. Addressing quality issues is vital to solid business operations, and ISO 9000 is a tool for doing just that, but it requires getting people at all levels of the organization connected and committed to improvement and encouraging their participation in improvement activities through proactive management leadership, according to Lewis Yasenchak, founder/owner of P&Y Consultants in his 2000 Plastics ISO 9000 Model article on solutions for managing the plastics supply chain to improve OEM total cost of manufacturing.

The Plastics ISO 9000 Model includes tooling and equipment-specific with performance measures, process-specific with performance measures, materials-specific with performance measures and services-specific with performance measures. It also provides training in processes, team building, statistical methods for process control and failure analysis. The standard measures the facility for excellence, including how the quality, safety and environmental functions affect the shop's bottom line, both directly and indirectly through self-auditing.