Golf Club Manufacturer Implements Quality Management
System
MetricStream's Quality*Stream
TaylorMade-adidas Golf is one
of the largest golf club manufacturers in the world. The
company's metalwoods, irons, wedges and putters are widely
used by professionals on the PGA tour.
TaylorMade uses a complex supply chain in its global operations.
Suppliers from many continents cooperate in manufacturing
the thousands of variations in a club, such as lie, loft
and face-angle, that give professional and amateur golfers
the performance they seek. The company has to manage hundreds
of process attributes on each club--measurements taken at
different times and locations--to ensure minimal variance
and maximum adherence to standards.
A need for an enterprisewide footprint for supplier quality
was realized. Several managers had already worked with smaller
off-the-shelf products that addressed one piece of the quality
management puzzle, but they unanimously agreed on a need
for an enterprisewide platform that would bring together
all quality initiatives and functionality. The software
had to be able to proactively manage hundreds of suppliers,
thousands of SKUs and millions of inspections daily. They
needed a system capable of aggregating, analyzing and reporting
information to key business owners as well as forming a
platform for collaborating on various design, manufacturing
and process management issues. Quality*Stream, a QMS from
MetricStream, seemed to fit the bill.
MetricStream is a five-year-old company that provides
enterprise quality management systems for global corporations.
The company supplies a scaleable and extensible Web-based
solution to address business processes and business events.
Quality*Stream enterprise level software was chosen to
implement the stringent quality control standards that the
TaylorMade Golf managers had set. Because Quality*Stream
is built on a flexible process flow designer and the configurable
MetricStream EPM platform, no expensive customization was
required to integrate the system into TaylorMade processes.
Within three weeks, service professionals modeled both
internal and external inspection processes, standards and
control limits, Cpk standards, processed attributes and
sample sizes. Users at supplier sites worldwide were able
to access, input and modify data over 28.8 K modems. To
prevent any data entry errors, various soft checks were
put into place, and dropdown lists were used to quickly
help the operators select their desired data entry options.
"In the old days, we were merely trying to track
quality, not really control it," says Rueben Inofuentes,
chief information systems architect at TaylorMade. "Quality*Stream
has given us the ability to manage the quality of our supply
base.
We don't waste time faxing and receiving documents; we
have the information we need at our fingertips, and we can
proactively measure and improve quality even prior to doing
a single inspection ourselves."
At the end of the three-week period, supplier quality
engineers were paged within hours of a batch of inventory
failing to measure up to standards, giving engineers several
days to fix the issue. Any nonconformaties were fed into
a nonconformance module to be managed and converted into
an action plan.
"We're looking forward to leveraging the MetricStream
platform to improve the quality issues associated with our
reverse logistics process, our custom production processes,
and other customer-facing interactions such as credit and
receivables management. The core message to all of this
is quality, and central to our quality initiative is Quality*Stream."
MetricStream's Quality*Stream
- Runs automated diagnostics to help identify root causes
- Mitigates the impact of quality events
- Collaboratively manages corrective action requests
www.metricstream.com
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