Your competitiveness relies on your suppliers
Products are more and more complex and the technical and organizational capability of the suppliers is fundamental to achieve the quality, time and cost targets.
Companies should therefore evaluate the performance and the capability of the suppliers and set up improvement programs.
4S helps your Company to evaluate, maintain and improve the real capability of your strategic suppliers to achieve the product and service requirements.
Services
4S provides the following services to improve the performance of the suppliers of your Company:
Maturity Level Appraisal
- Evaluation of the capability of the suppliers to reach the customer targets in terms of product and service, especially for specific areas such as: Functional Safety, Reliability, Electric/Electronic Architectures, Product Development Process, Quality Management System, etc.
- Gap analysis and identification and monitoring of improvement actions.
Company Processes Development
- Support the suppliers to implement the requirements for all the processes that need improvement actions according to the gap analysis.
Methods & Processes Audit
- Check of the compliance of the core suppliers activities with the requirements defined in the improvement program or in specific standards (e.g. ISO 9001, ISO/TS 16949, ISO 26262 (future norm), etc.
Training & Qualification
Training can be provided to your suppliers for the main methods relevant to the 4S action areas, such as:
- Functional Safety
- Concurrent Engineering (methods & tools: see Product Development action area)
- Reliability, RAMS (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety)
- Management Systems (Quality, Environment and Workplace Safety)
- Geometric Tolerance Management (Analysis and Allocation)
- Statistical Process Control
- Other tailored training programs to fill the gaps identified with the Maturity Level Appraisal and Audits.
Services for Development of Products
4S provides your Company with the services listed hereafter aimed to support the development of a product in a specific project.
The 4S qualified and experienced technicians, with excellent skills in the main processes and technologies, will guarantee a very concrete and result-oriented approach.
Application Support
The strategic suppliers development programs regarding specific projects will be defined and monitored with special focus on:
- Customer product and process targets review
- Prevention and validation plan (D/P FMEA, Testing, etc.)
- Production processes capability evaluation and monitoring
- Reliability Programme (see Product Reliability)
- Product Functional Safety (if required, see Functional Safety)
- RAMS (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety) program (if required)
- Risk Management
- Advanced Product Quality Plan (APQP) monitoring
- Production Plan Approval Process (PPAP) monitoring
- Prototypes, pre-series and series Control Plans
- Problem Solving management, with feedback to the customer
Performance Assessment
Performance Assessment is a complete evaluation by 4S of the results achieved by the suppliers in a project for a specific product vs. the customer requirements with the following main tasks:
- KPI identification and monitoring
- Suppliers readiness continuous check
Project Management
4S helps you to define and manage a complete Program, including the related working groups (Design/Process FMEA, problem solving, etc.) for the development of a specific product or manufacturing process.
Testing Management
4S can define effective and optimized test plans required for product verification and validation.
Products: software tools
4S can provide customer tailored software tools to manage tasks for specific industry sectors, including Prevention and Validation Plan, Reliability Test Plan, D/P FMEA and Problem Solving Data Base.