Impact of information sharing on statistical quality control

With recent advances in information technology (IT), the research on and practice of information sharing is now having a significant impact on many aspects of supply chains. Nevertheless, few investigations focus on the impact of information sharing on product and process quality. Furthermore, it is still not clear how and what information should be shared or used, and how to quantify the benefits of information sharing in terms of quality improvement. In this research, a “matching problem” is used to demonstrate the impact of information sharing on quality. We quantify and compare the impact of different information-sharing strategies on process and product quality, and suggest that real-time information sharing may lead to dramatic quality improvement for an assembly process, the example here being a two-stage supply chain. The proposed approach to evaluate information sharing in terms of quality improvement can be extended to a more complex supply chain.