Why vendors need internal quality management: Benefits, KPIs, and tips
Inspectorio Inc
March 28, 2023
Major hosiery manufacturer and exporter Interloop has leveraged Inspectorio’s Sight platform to create resilience against disruptions across their entire supply chain.
The past decade has seen tremendous growth in supply chain cost, efficiency, and strategic proximity-to-market maneuvering — however, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a substantial vulnerability in those supply chains that did not also prioritize resilience.
For organizations that rely on overseas factories and vendors for production, resilience means the ability to absorb unexpected blows and move past them with minimal damage, whether by rebounding to their original state or by adapting to a new normal that maximizes financial performance and market share.
For Interloop Limited, one of the world’s largest hosiery manufacturers and exporters, Inspectorio’s Sight platform has helped not only survive the pandemic, but also put them in a position to come out stronger on the other side.
Interloop’s goals for Sight included:
- obtaining complete visibility over their supply chain
- access to real-time data
- powerful analytics to interpret a vast quantity of incoming data and turn it into actionable insights.
The platform has provided a one-stop solution to these goals. As this article illustrates, Interloop has leveraged Sight to future-proof their supply chain and create resilience against other unforeseen disruptions.
The challenges firms face in the new normal
In the current and post COVID-19 world, resiliency is paramount; however, it can’t come at the cost of a supply chain’s efficiency.
The World Economic Forum writes that “accelerated digitalization and uptake of new technologies can help firms find a balance between supply chain resiliency and efficiency,” a sentiment echoed recently by Supply Chain and International Data Corporation.
Digitalization in business will help protect against a new rise in protectionism in the form of international economic sanctions, which is likely to increase the cost of goods and present a challenge to resilience.
Industry chains will face varying levels of vulnerability to shocks that are becoming both more frequent and more severe. Vulnerability will depend on the firm’s factors of production and geographic footprint, according to McKinsey & Company, with losses of ≥50% of annual income likely to occur over each decade due to shocks. They write that companies “need the ability to respond quickly” to shocks and must “strengthen supply chain risk management and improve end-to-end transparency” to minimize their exposure.
What Interloop has accomplished with Inspectorio Sight
Headquartered in Pakistan, Interloop Limited is a world-renowned manufacturing company and multi-category supplier of a range of Hosiery products and Denim, Knitwear & Active Wear Apparel, to top international brands and retailers. They implemented Inspectorio Sight in October 2018 and have been using the platform ever since to streamline their quality and compliance measures.
However, when COVID-19 struck, corporations around the world began coming unglued due to factory closures, localized outbreaks, and the inability to conduct inspections and quality audits due to travel restrictions and shelter-in-place orders. Brands and retailers worldwide have faced massive inventory crises, with product sitting uninspected and unshipped on factory floors.
Using Sight, Interloop took proactive measures to weather the disruptions. The success of their proactive approach has stemmed from their factories’ ability to conduct Self-Inspections or ‘Remote Inspections’ through Inspectorio Sight.
Despite strict COVID-19 mobility restrictions preventing other brands and retailers from performing any inspections at all, Interloop has conducted hundreds of Self-Inspections in its factories since the crisis began. This has meant income and business continuation in a time when other corporations have none.
Inspectorio Sight empowered Interloop to continue production throughout the worst crisis to impact the global economy in living memory — here’s how.
How Inspectorio provided Interloop resilience against COVID-19
Becoming more resilient to disruptions requires improvement in five different areas. Here is how Inspectorio Sight has empowered Interloop to address each of these different needs:
1. Achieving full visibility over a complex supply chain
Resilient companies are agile companies, and agility requires end-to-end transparency throughout their supply chains. This makes it easier to identify high-risk areas and to rearrange resources or reduce production proactively in the event of a disruption.
“[Inspectorio Sight] provides an inspection checklist for validation, which considerably reduces the probability of error” and helps address batch defects.
Furthermore, Sight’s factory and inspector performance analytics tools ensure visibility over the number of inspections per auditor, defect analysis, average inspection time, and more. “Through Inspectorio Sight, a data pool was created which helped the process owners forecast potential issues.”
2. Access to data in real-time
With a continuous, massive influx of real-time data, Inspectorio Sight serves as a single source of truth for the performance of factories, inspectors, and more.
Interloop writes that “Inspectorio Sight works as a data center for all conducted […] DUPRO and FRI, along with different analyses to be utilized for future improvements.” Machine learning evaluates “the historical data of our factories as well as related information about the fabrics and other materials used for each product.”
Additionally, a standard pre-production meeting questionnaire helps gauge and prepare each department in advance. By giving “both Interloop and its customer access to inspection and product quality data,” Inspectorio increases “the accuracy, efficiency, and transparency of every sourced material, production, and inspection history.”
3. Enhanced production planning capabilities
Sight helps a company’s bottom line by simplifying production planning, resource allocation, and the understanding of each facility’s performance within an ecosystem.
“Inspectorio Sight provides digital performance analytics for all facilities,” writes Interloop, “including inspected quantity, total inspections, pulled samples, defective rate, and defect classification.”
4. End-to-end supply chain collaboration
By promoting proactive collaboration and partnership between all factories in a production ecosystem, a firm maintains better relationships and less policing as a means of risk reduction. This also results in greater accountability and standardization across the chain, which reduces inertia and fosters more effective communication.
“By using this Platform, various teams are now digitally connected in our supply chain and have an enhanced real-time access to data across various reporting tools.”
Interloop
This delivers the necessary tactical intel to management. In addition to significantly improved efficiency in time management, “this tool has made it a lot easier for us to comply with the ever-evolving regulations.”
5. Powerful analytics
With more data comes the need for more automation and advanced analytics, which let decision makers glean an in-depth understanding of complex systems in very little time through data visualization. Inspectorio Sight’s powerful analytics operate in real-time through artificial intelligence and machine learning, which identifies anomalies and alerts stakeholders to changes in the ecosystem that could indicate risk.
For Interloop, Inspectorio Sight’s analytics have proven indispensable in identifying problem areas and allowing for quick optimization. After facing a challenge during pre-production planning in one of their factories, Interloop writes, “We used the report of that [meeting] to focus and improve for future [pre-production planning],” letting them quickly work through a problem before it became a larger issue.
Inspectorio Sight creates supply chain resilience rapidly
As we move forward into the new normal, supply chain resilience is more important than ever before. Inspectorio Sight gives your firm end-to-end quality control with real-time data aggregation and actionable insights in an intuitive user interface.
To assess how resilient your firm’s operations are, take Inspectorio’s assessment for resilience. Interloop used Sight to maintain stability and continuity during the pandemic — and with rapid onboarding, industry-leading customer support, and thorough customization to different organizations models, Sight is able to move your firm toward resilience as well.
Read more about Sight’s revolutionary capabilities here.
