Supply Chain Quality Management

In today's economy, it is no longer business versus business, but rather supply chain versus supply chain. To compete, supply chain members must learn to seamlessly integrate, grow, and develop business functions. Traditional quality management practices have been and will continue to be used to address many of these supply chain integration issues. With this in mind, current managerial thinking is advancing the notion of supply chain quality management. Supply chain quality management is a systems-based approach to performance improvement that integrates supply chain partners and leverages opportunities created by upstream and downstream linkages with a focus on creating value and achieving satisfaction of intermediate and final customers (Foster, 2008; Robinson & Malhotra, 2005). The intent of the chapter is to (1) review the positive impact of quality management on supply chain management, (2) present cases of supply chain improvements through quality management with a focus on the processes of design, production, delivery, support, and supplier-customer relationships, and (3) discuss the best practice recommendations, relationship between total quality management factors and transition to supply chain quality management that follow from these results.