Seminar on Improving Customer Satisfaction with better Supply Chain Management

Hong Kong Society for Quality (HKSQ) celebrated World Quality Month (WQM) in November and arranged different activities in this month. The 2nd seminar entitled "Imprving Customer Satisfaction with better Supply Chain Management" organized by HKSQ and co-organized by BSI and PolyU on 16 Nov 2012. The seminar aimed to help companies enhance performance and achieve strategic competitiveness through effective supply chain management (SCM).

Ms. Patsy Cheng (Client Manager, Supply Chain Management, BSI) was our guest speaker and she said supply chain was upstream and downstream linkages.

Then she used Boeing 787 as example to explain the huge supply chain through six countries.

The follow diagram showed the business processes of SCM. She said it should be identified who was critical suppliers and the risk if they failure.

Ms. Patsy introduced key drivers to improve SCM and the first three drivers were "Resilience", "Responsiveness" and "Green Product/Service". After that she introduced Supply Chain Continuity Management (SCCM) which was combined Business Continuity Management (BCM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM). The SCCM model was showed below.

Step 1: Analysis of Supply Chain (SC)
Determine scope of SC and then mapping SC. Define critical product/service and priority its risk. Some methods of risk priority was demonstrated.

Step 2: Developing Strategies
Defining recovery requirements and review the supplier's continuity capability. The follow diagram explained the relationship between Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Maximum Tolerable Period Downtime (MTPD). (Usually, RTO < MTPD)

Step 3: Operational
It related to respond effectiveness and the key points were 4C included Communication, Collaboration, Coordination and Culture. The steps on operational was mentioned in the diagram.

Step 4: Assurance Ongoing Management
It is to verify or validate and improve the level of continuity management, as well as, to monitor and proactive detection mechanism for any changes.

Finally, Ms. Patsy Cheng concluded that SCCM provided clear picture on supply chain and gaven a better understanding of supplier management, as well as, to ensure continuous operation of supplier.

Q&A Session

Mr. Karson Chui (Chairman of HKSQ) presented a souvenir to Ms. Patsy Cheng.

Reference:
HKSQ World Quality Month - http://www.hksq.org/world_quality_month.htm