Innovative Quality Strategies for Global Value-Added-Networks

Many companies no longer act locally within their domestic markets, but have established a global network of worldwide production sites. Due to the long and diversified structures of supply chains and differences in the maturity levels of sup- pliers, distributed networks develop various fluctuations, in terms of varying product quality and delivery times, which can result in image loss and financial losses to the companies of the network. Moreover, an improperly implemented quality strategy in a network will result in higher costs. The preliminary idea is to make these networks insensitive to such fluctuations by identifying and evaluating suitable quality strate- gies. Due to the absence of site-specific optimization and the complex structures of networks, it is difficult to find suitable quality strategies for production networks. The complexity in the networks includes unknown defect propagation, limited influence due to decentralized structures and conflicting objectives and unknown inter-rela- tionships amongst the various supply chain members. The research project IQ.net deals with these problems by developing innovative methods, models and practical tools for planning, optimization and control of quality strategies for globally distributed pro- duction networks, thus obtaining zero-defect production networks. This chapter aims to discuss various aspects of IQ.net including, the definition of quality in networks, the analysis and evaluation of various systems for managing network-wide quality data considering local versus global data, as well as, three core methods to identify robust quality strategies for specific network configurations.