Policy Research Of Quality Improvement In The Supply Chain Dominated By The Purchaser

Quality is a competitive factor for a brand. As supply chain develops, all related members come down to the final product's quality, then coordinating the quality-improvement efforts has become the key issue in the quality management of supply chain. For making sure the supply chain's quality, Present research has always been studying to filter the suppliers and then supervise their quality through punishment, and quality improvement is also limited to operations inside the walls of the supplier's firm. But in the practice, many excellence companies have intensify their leading role, investing into the supplier's quality improvement initiatively Thus, it will be valuable for the practice to study when and how the purchase should invest into the supplier, which will develop the purchaser's dominant part furtherly.This paper considered a supply chain with symmetrical information, including only a purchaser and a single supplier. The purchaser owned the brand, yet outsourced the production to the supplier. For the given quality level of the supplier, the purchase had a prior choice to invest. After introducing a series of costs related with the quality improvement for the both parts, this paper firstly aimed for the supply chain's whole benefit and founded the quality improvement model of the supply chain. Taking the improved quality level as decision-making variable, the joint optimal strategy for the quality improvement could be obtained. Basing on this, this paper founded the costs models for the both respectively, through separating the costs incurred by the sold rejects. Under this condition, the two parties pursued the minimal cost for themselves. Taking the purchaser as the leader, the paper studied when the two parties would invest into quality improvement initially and the role they would play.The paper can conform that, as the core decision-maker among the supply chain, the purchaser's investment in quality improvement has a significant influence on the profit of the both sides and even the whole supply chain, and he cannot cede the responsibility of quality improvement to the supplier in many cases. Especially, when the purchaser expect high quality level, he would actively, initially invest into the supplier's quality improvement. Besides, This paper also investigated how quality improvement decisions interacts with operational decisions such as supplier's production lot size.