Ensure quality and environmental compliance through a collaboration platform

Digital processes promote and expand the collaboration in the supply chain

It's time for a new perspective: the chain is actually a network

Do you think that supply chains tend to be weak and unreliable? In point fact, they are robust and widespread networks. Quality in these supply networks does not result from the sum of quality contributions by individual suppliers, but rather from the interconnection of the people involved in the network. New forms of organizations and interconnecting experienced employees promote quality assurance across suppliers.

Suppliers are integrated into widespread networks in which many of them are both supplier and customer. In extreme cases, even companies within the same network can be both a supplier and a customer of each other. Increasing digitalization is strengthening and accelerating network interconnection.

An example of one of the largest supply networks: The automotive industry.
The OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers - i.e. the automobile manufacturers) are at the end of the supply chain - powerful nodes that are widespread and connected to thousands of suppliers worldwide. If an OEM falls out of the network, the network remains stable and continues to function despite a large gap. Network interconnection is critical to the success of manufacturers in order to collectively and successfully achieve quality, innovation and performance.

Considerable quality data has already been collected digitally, but it has not yet been sufficiently linked together.

"Quality can only result from interconnected networking".

The exchange of ideas and collaboration within a network has a beneficial effect on quality because mutual trust and open communication within the networks have grown over time.

This is where material.one comes into play. material.one takes on the challenge of interconnecting all of the companies and people involved in creating a complex end product in a coherent network. material.one helps manufacturers avoid problems and errors that, despite many laws and standards, can lead to product recalls. Away from mandatory quality methodsthat are only done as a formality - towards the consideration that "individuals and interactions are more important than processes and methods"; as is the case with agile software development. Like stated in one prescient technical article from DGQ: "Good interaction and good processes lead to quality".

To continue with the example of the automotive industry - about 80 % of the automotive components cone from the supply chain network (SCN).  Either the various parties do not know the entire supply chain network (SCN) or are only allowed to talk to their direct contractual partner for compliance reasons. Even today, these are still document-driven processes in many cases. The increasing effort is scaled via additional personnel, generating additional costs. Transfers from documents to release systems always carry risks, generate errors and provide insufficient control and transparency. Increased costs often come from traditional Peer-to-Peer-communicates where everyone communicates with everyone else somehow. In this case data is not digitized end-to-end, but merely transferred 1:1 in PDF, Excel, Word and similar file formats. With the material.one concept, everyone can still communicate with everyone else - but in a centralized and vastly standardized way. This is the challenge, and this is where we come in.

material.one ensures compliance conforming communication throughout the network, standardizes and converts exchange formats, and unites processes for all users and decision-makers involved in the supply network.

It is the concept of a "Supply Chain Collaboration Platform" with a focus on requirements management, evidence management and release processes (and part of PPF, PPAP, APQP, FMEA)