Enabling Supplier Quality on Unifize

When we had our paper system, you know, and we were getting parts in from different vendors. And if there were parts that were out of specification or that sort of thing, you know, being in the research space, kind of documenting it. And it was very tribal knowledge of, you know, oh, we just know that this vendor has difficulty with this, that or the other which tribal knowledge is pretty useless, especially when you have people leaving the company coming back to, you know, new people joining the company.

And a lot of that knowledge gets lost. So the ability, you know, we've seen in Unifize, you know, we've had vendors who we've been working with since the beginning and noticing that, oh, wait, you know, because of the trending, we're able to see they've actually have a terrible yield rate. Or every time they send us a lot of parts, we've noticed that, you know, 30% are out of spec or, you know, they're there's a specific type of part that's really critical to the robot that almost always comes in out of spec.

And we're always scrambling to try to fix that. And I think it's really easy to be reactive in that situation where you're like, okay, let me fix it. Let me contact the vendor and get them to send me another part and make sure that it's correct. And it's really easy to put out a fire and move on. But with Unifize, we've been able to see, Oh, hey, this is a pattern.

And being able to use that evidence to go to our vendor and say, Hey, this is what we need from you. You know, we need you know, this is what we need from you. We need you all to work on your yield, to work on your processes. And that has been able to allow us to work with our vendors and have the evidence to say, hey, we you know, we deserve we deserve parts that are made correctly.

And especially when you have a small company that doesn't have like the buying power of a large medical device company like Stryker or whatever, you know, it's really you have to be you have to advocate for yourself and Unifize is allowed us to abdicate for ourselves by showing them these trending non conformance is or these trending issues to be able to open up a SCAR (supplier corrective action) report really easily and say here's the history, here's why we need to work together to come to a solution or we're not going to be working together anymore.

And that's able to work on, you know, time is money. And so being able to build robots in a quick way with good parts, you know, that's able to allow us to have a higher yield on the manufacturing floor to build more parts in a more efficient way because we're able to show what we need. And if we need to go to a different vendor, we have the history to explain to maybe higher ups or other people who don't understand what's going on, why we need to have a change.

And Unifize just makes that so much more simple, because right at a click of a button, I can go instantly to what we're referring to and double check it and make sure we're compliant.