Management of Suppliers
HKU918
NEALE O’CONNOR
ANNE WU
SHANNON ANDERSON
PQI: MANAGEMENT OF SUPPLIERS
Taiwan-based memory manufacturer Power Quotient International Co. Ltd (“PQI”) had an established system for selecting, assessing and managing suppliers. A scoring system that assessed suppliers in areas ranging from technical expertise to service quality and responsiveness made it easy for the management to spot suppliers’ strengths and weaknesses and to decide whether to keep a supplier at arm’s length or to cultivate a strong relationship with the supplier. PQI had just completed its biannual evaluation of suppliers, several of which required further investigation. These suppliers received only average scores despite strong performance both technically and commercially. Meanwhile, PQI’s management wondered whether sharing its assessment results openly with suppliers might help to improve its relationships with them.
The Memory Industry
Memory in electronic devices stored data on integrated circuits using semiconductor technology. Different types of memory were used for different applications. Random access memory (“RAM”) was a type of volatile memory, meaning that data stored on RAM would be lost after the power to a device was switched off, and was used mostly in computing applications. The two types of RAM were static RAM (“SRAM”) and dynamic RAM
(“DRAM”). SRAM was commonly used for cache memory, while DRAM was used in computing applications. Flash memory was used mostly in communication and consumer devices such as mobile phones, digital cameras, media players and digital video cameras because of its ability to retain data even when the device was powered off. Within the category of flash memory, NOR memory, which was named after the data mapping technology (Not OR),was used mostly for storing small amounts of executable code for computing devices; and NAND memory, which was named after the data mapping technology (Not AND), was used for bulk storage
NEALE O’CONNOR
ANNE WU
SHANNON ANDERSON
PQI: MANAGEMENT OF SUPPLIERS
Taiwan-based memory manufacturer Power Quotient International Co. Ltd (“PQI”) had an established system for selecting, assessing and managing suppliers. A scoring system that assessed suppliers in areas ranging from technical expertise to service quality and responsiveness made it easy for the management to spot suppliers’ strengths and weaknesses and to decide whether to keep a supplier at arm’s length or to cultivate a strong relationship with the supplier. PQI had just completed its biannual evaluation of suppliers, several of which required further investigation. These suppliers received only average scores despite strong performance both technically and commercially. Meanwhile, PQI’s management wondered whether sharing its assessment results openly with suppliers might help to improve its relationships with them.
The Memory Industry
Memory in electronic devices stored data on integrated circuits using semiconductor technology. Different types of memory were used for different applications. Random access memory (“RAM”) was a type of volatile memory, meaning that data stored on RAM would be lost after the power to a device was switched off, and was used mostly in computing applications. The two types of RAM were static RAM (“SRAM”) and dynamic RAM
(“DRAM”). SRAM was commonly used for cache memory, while DRAM was used in computing applications. Flash memory was used mostly in communication and consumer devices such as mobile phones, digital cameras, media players and digital video cameras because of its ability to retain data even when the device was powered off. Within the category of flash memory, NOR memory, which was named after the data mapping technology (Not OR),was used mostly for storing small amounts of executable code for computing devices; and NAND memory, which was named after the data mapping technology (Not AND), was used for bulk storage