Advanced Before Its Time

“The price you pay doesn’t always reflect the total cost.”

- W. Edwards Deming, U.S. statistician, educator and advocate of quality control methods in industrial production

That, in a nutshell, is the focus of SRM.

In its infancy, early versions of SRM were developed to track both Certificate of Analysis (COA) data from pulp vendors and also analyze data generated from testing the products of those same vendors once received. To put it into perspective, this first iteration ran on a Commodore PET, required one floppy disk per vendor (47 in all) and stored everything in flat text files.

Prehistoric?

Seemingly so. Yet it was actually ahead of its time in its ability to combine computing power, magnetic storage and statistical routines to provide a very effective way of assessing the capability and stability of vendors and the materials they supply. In fact some of the techniques applied then remain cutting-edge to this day.

From there, the next version rapidly advanced to an IBM PC with a database stored on a hard drive and multi-color graphic analysis. The year was 1986 and the core module of QIS was still a full 18 months from release.

Once QIS was established, SRM progressed and joined forces with its powerhouse QIS application to provide tools that could be used to establish the validity of Deming’s statement above. Truth is, he was right.

Today, with simple logging of COA data into SRM, companies can readily establish facts about vendors, materials and, more importantly, the capability of supplier processes. Gaining statistically sound information on the stability of supply, step changes or trends is extremely useful, especially when attained proactively, before they impact production. This cost-effective, highly efficient tool provides immediate alerts when variances are detected and facilitates swift corrective action.

Timing is everything.

Kevin Luxton
Founder and CEO 24+ years