Supplier Qualification in Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage

MARKUS GUNDERSEN: Hi, and welcome to this session about Supplier Qualification in Fusion 360 Manage. You've probably seen this one already or are going to see it a lot, but it's a Safe Harbor Statement. So you can read it later.

The agenda for this session is quick words about me and advice, short introduction to Fusion 360 Manage, the what and the why of Supplier Qualification, and the how. So let's get started with me. At Addwize, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Addwize. I really believe we can create more with less if we start understanding our products field performance. And as a part of creating more with less, I think that we need to focus more on quality management and therefore, the quality management aspect of supplier management.

There is a rumor in Europe that you should never buy or drive a French car. As it happens, according to Insider.com, the world's best pepper grinder is made from a French car manufacturer. I'm not going to name drop the brand, but Google still works after ChatGPT. And many companies are providing suppliers based on-- are approving suppliers based on one product at one date just when the need is for that specific product. Over months or years, the supplier can start with other products or the existing ones can become lacking in quality, because of new sub suppliers, new manufacturing plants, et cetera.

As with the French car manufacturer, even though they have the best pepper grinders, I honestly believe it's not the best cars. So Addwize is a Norwegian-based consultancy company with main offices in Oslo, the capital of Norway in Northern Europe, for those of you that are not known. We are a software agnostic company, meaning we know a thing or two about stuff outside the Autodesk world as well. Currently, we are approximately 21 people working in and for Addwize.

So there are many things to say about Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage. I'll try to keep it short. First of all, Fusion 360 Manage is a very flexible and configurable PLM system used by companies in diverse industries. It is really connected data with the product at the center. It's very easily integratable to different business systems, such as Vault PDM, different ERP systems, different CRM systems, different BI reporting tools, like Microsoft Power BI, et cetera.

Even though it's very configurable, it comes with a great set of very capable modules for managing your products and everything around it as shown in this slide. So as we can see, we have a product in the center. We have all the related files connected to it, such as drawings coming from Vault.

We have the complete engineering bill of material. We have the same product inside of the ERP system and everything is connected in Fusion 360 Manage. And this makes Fusion 360 Manage as a single source of truth for multiple different capabilities and needs for different companies.

Speaking of these different capabilities, these are the core ones. So we have different features and functions for new product introduction to release new products to market faster. You have a really good capabilities for managing your bill of materials. You have an online product information, supply chain collaboration, change management, and quality management. And as you probably know, we're going to talk about the supply chain collaboration capability and inside of that equality aspect of supply chain.

From a product perspective, this means that you can know everything you need about your product-- quantity revisions, different life cycles, all the files, and as well as the status on the different suppliers that your product consists of. It's easy to see that, for example, item number 10, this electrical box, has an unapproved supplier while item 20 has a supplier undergoing review. And with this information, you need to figure out what does that mean for sales, production, procurement. Or, if it's early on in the new product introduction, what does it mean for your product launch?

In Fusion 360 Manage, you'll get a lot of different features and modules to manage your product and everything around it, as previously mentioned. But in a supplier management context, what do you get? You have an approved vendors list, approved manufacturers list. You have a system to maintain and relate your manufacturer's part numbers, supplier audit, which we will look into later, risk assessment, supplier quarterly business review, supplier corrective action request, supplier categorization. That's some out-of-the-box features.

So what is supplier qualification and the quality aspect of supplier management? And why do we need it? So there's mainly three key what's. It might not fit your company exactly. But as we'll look into later, there are many different industries, and trying to give out three key is hard. But in a PLM context, supplier qualification refers to the process of evaluating and assessing suppliers to ensure they meet specific criteria and standards necessary for us, successful and reliable partnership.

So if you look at assessing supplier capabilities, it helps you involve and examine a supplier's capability, including their manufacturing process, their quality control procedures, and technical expertise. This assessment helps determine if the supplier can meet the product requirements and standards set by the company. Evaluating compliance and reliability, it includes verifying if the supplier complies with industry regulations, safety standards, and ethical practices-- environmental, social, governance, whatever. This evaluation helps ensure that the supplier is reliable, ethical, and can be trusted to deliver products and components consistently.

And risk mitigations, supplier qualification also serve as a way to identify and mitigate potential risks in the supply chain by thoroughly evaluating suppliers, companies can reduce the likelihood of production disruptions, quality issues, and other challenges that could impact the product's life cycle. In summary, supplier qualification in the PLM context is the process of evaluating suppliers to determine their capabilities, compliance, and reliability to mitigate risks, and ensure successful product development and life cycle management.

So as I mentioned, different industries has different why's. If you look at manufacturing, we are really keen to these three why's with quality assurance, ensure consistent quality of raw material and components, reducing defects in finished products. And regarding cost efficiency, it helps negotiate better prices with qualified suppliers, optimizing manufacturing costs, supply chain reliability, reduces the risk of supply disruptions, and ensure timely deliveries.

For medical devices or pharmaceutical healthcare, compliance is to make sure that the supplier meets strict regulation or regulatory requirements for safety. Patient safety, of course, guarantees the quality and reliability of ingredients and materials used in the pharmaceuticals and medical devices, so the bill of materials from your supplier again. Risk management minimize the risk of recalls or product safety issues.

In an energy perspective, like oil and gas, wind, water, hydrogen, whatever, it's about reliability to ensure that your supplier has critical components available, so that you can stay on your power generation and distribution. Safety, reduce the risk of equipment failures that can lead to accidents and power outages. Environmental compliance supports sustainability, energy initiatives, and environmental regulations.

Industrial machinery. Quality assurance, ensuring the quality and consistency of components and materials supplied by qualified suppliers is paramount. Regulatory compliance, supply chain resilience, so it's quite similar but different key why's for the different industries. And there are many more industries. So my recommendation is to find whatever is your what and why, and then start to work on the supplier qualification.

So in summary, supplier qualification is a critical process for businesses in various industries as it directly impacts product quality, regulatory compliance, cost management, supply chain resilience, and overall business reputation, meaning your reputation. It helps companies establish robust and reliable supplier relationships leading to sustained success in their respective markets.

So probably the reason why you're here. So how can we leverage Fusion 360 Manage for supplier qualification? So using Fusion 360 Manage allows you to manage the suppliers themself, the suppliers you already have through PLM, you can actually start to list them out. This list can also come in, and we can integrate with CRM if that's your core platform for managing suppliers or creating them, ERP, doesn't matter. So this can be synchronized back and forward having different rules.

Fusion 360 Manage allows you to list out all of your suppliers and their metadata. When I say that, I mean the contact information, and the audit team members, any deviations, noncomformities, their next review cycle, different products they are approved to deliver to you. It doesn't matter in reality. It allows you to manage all of that. And this is better than managing it in contacts in an email system, or in an Excel spreadsheet, or by word of mouth, and those type of manual or and isolated methods.

It's more than just a list. What you see here is a list and the current date. As you can see, we have some suppliers in the Create state. Some are Active. Some are Undergoing Review, et cetera.

Regarding your supplier status means that we could put each supplier to a particular state or gate. Some suppliers, when you first create them, they will be created, and then they will go under a review that will mark them as active, or inactive, or still in review. Or, you can also set them active immediately because of the initial risk review you did.

The workflow you see in this screenshot is just an example. I'll show you multiple examples later. It's what comes out of the box. But you can customize it and add more states, add more transitions, multiple reviewers, whatever is important for your company, you can digitalize that into Fusion.

So if you look at an approved manufacturer or vendors list, kind of two different lists in reality, but the features for managing it is the same. For instance, inside of an approved manufacturer list, what you are seeing here is a particular item that would be on a bill of materials for that item. Up top, you'll see your own part number, for instance, this one. And then further down here, you'll see the approved manufacturing list or approved manufacturing part. Call it whatever.

So you have all the different manufacturing part numbers, the different manufacturers, and the different preference. So you can see that arrow with this number is the preferred one. Also, I've listed one do not use. You can add multiple different properties, like cost, lead time, direct URL to their data sheet.

In this example, we'll see we have five different options. But we can add more-- 10, 15, 20, 100, whatever suits your company. This means for any given component that you have in your system, you can have different places to source it from with different inventory levels, costing levels, and so on. So now, it's just more than just a list of suppliers and what parts to use and where to get it, meaning you see all the text in blue? That's clickable items, which it's back to the suppliers list on the previous slides.

You could also invite your suppliers into your PLM site. Fusion Manage has the ability to invite them in and make them a part of a group that's controlled. So it's a granular set of permission that goes with this. So you can invite suppliers into your tenant.

You can grant and limit permissions. They can participate in anything you want, from workflow to updating costing, data sheets, different drawings, whatever. The permission model goes from just inviting them into their site all the way through what workspace, what records, what tabs, what section, and what fields they have access to. So you're not just opening the door and inviting them to the whole house, you have a specific drawer in one specific section in your kitchen that they have access to.

For the supplier, this might look like something like this. They have access to go into a bill of material on your product and update things. In this screenshot, they have access to see a supplier view of the bill of material and they have access right to add ROS drawing, their drawing number, or whatever. So you can actually control and choose what they are allowed to update and give information on, so you don't have to chase your supplier to figure out all the different information.

Yep, through the people pillar, we can not only manage the suppliers, because, let's be honest, they are humans. They are people out there. But we can also manage exactly what they have to do, what they see, and give them a role. In this scenario, we see, actually, the change of ROS. "ROS" in English, probably.

Yeah, so to the core of this demonstration, we have the supplier audit. When you create a new supplier in Fusion 360 Manage, you introduce a new vendor, manufacturer, distributor, whatever, we can run an audit, and we can actually tie an audit to it. That means as we introduce them, we can put them through a set of standard procedures, which you already have in place today or you can use the one that comes out of the box. If you need more information, you can actually send the audit back to the supplier and have them come back with the missing information. If everything is good, then you're good to go.

There's, by the way, also a possibility to choose the audit frequency. So each supplier in different kind of levels have different frequency of how often they need to be audited. So some critical suppliers, you would like to audit every year, for example, non-critical every third year, fifth year, whatever.

If we take this process even further, we can set up a workspace called Supplier Quarterly Business Review. And in this QBR, it's more than just managing the supplier. It's managing any information related to them or any issues that they have come up, the annual spend, RMAs-- Return Merchandise Authorizations-- that were attributed to them and the noncomformities, any other data that you would want within here.

We have not only the capture of the data, we have links to the supplier workspace. We have a workflow notification, workflow action. Oftentimes, there's a collection of other things that come up.

So through the supplier corrective action request-- which I call a formal way of saying to your supplier, please get your shit together and document what you have done to get your shit together-- we have a process in Fusion. And it means through milestones and the workflow, to identify if issues do come up, root cause, corrective actions, how are we going to measure, and monitor and, ultimately, close it out?

These two workspaces work together with the supplier to collect all the information. This takes it away from saved emails, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets that are printed off and calendar reminders in Outlook or your Gmail whatever. We can put it all right inside of the system and allow you to manage your suppliers, your vendors, and your manufacturers, your whole supply chain.

So I'll go to the fun side of it. So if I open Fusion 360 Manage here, you can see that I currently have a list of different suppliers. I'll create a new supplier, and then I will audit them with just one example. So to create-- I just have to log in again.

So to create a supplier, we have different types of fields all inside of Fusion. In this case, I only have the name as mandatory. There are possibilities to put different fields, different mandatory or regulatory demands, not regulatory, but permission settings. So name, I'll just call it AU23 Demo1.

Type, if I'm going to choose it, it's not mandatory, so I don't honestly care. It's not-- it doesn't have anything to do with the demo. It's a review team. I have some possibilities to add address and so on, the contact details for sales, engineering, manufacturing, and the multiple rows below with different roles. It could be somewhere else, a lot of different options there.

Then, I save this supplier now. See the evaluation. I'm not going to review it based on frequency. But I could now go in and not change it-- sorry, it's only on Create. You see that the supplier has an approval workflow, a status.

You can see the Create. It's connected to this blue box. If I go back to my list, I'll find AU23, somewhere here, Demo1. You see it's in Create state. So opening the workflow map again, I'll submit it to review.

And that's mentioned in this Post-it note. It will automatically generate an audit report, which I actually have to complete before I can approve it. So if we go back to my front page, I see now that there's an audit called AU168 for supplier AU23 Demo1. And if I try to approve the supplier, I will get a notification saying the audit has to be complete before I can actually choose whether or not. So this helps the different users, new users, in your system to follow your internal processes, because the system helps you to do what you need to do.

OK, opening the audit form, there's different sections with different questions, different stuff I care about. So I can answer this different questions and comments. This supplier is only 9001 certified, but not for 10001. It's not called 14000 anymore.

I think rate their maturity for quality processes. They are advanced. Their corrective and preventive action process is industry leading. Intermediate. And now, it was basic change control process. So sorry. I have to choose one. I did the audit, of course, today.

So you see that this audit is connected to today's date, which means if I'm going to do it every year, I have control of the different revisions through time. This audit has a grid, which is quite similar to a spreadsheet where you can add rows and give more details about the audit findings, when did you close it. You can categorize it in which area, et cetera.

If there's any related corrective and preventive actions that you have done when you did the audit, they will be listed down here, or you can even create new ones, meaning if you are at the supplier side, and you find some audits that you need to track or give out actions to the supplier or someone internal to your system, you can create the [INAUDIBLE] and give it to a named person. Have different review teams.

So now, we're connecting the different suppliers, supplier audit, with a task management or action management kind of system. I'm not going to do it. And then I have the workflow of the audit, so you can see, this might be confusing for some, but the supplier has one workflow, which is the different gate the supplier are going under. And this audit has another workflow, which is specific to audits.

So if I just quickly approve the supplier without any issues, everything is good. Everything is perfect.

Then the audit is marked as locked and complete, and now I can approve the supplier or, in there, activate it. So that's the two options in this case.

Yes, so that was basic how creating a supplier works and how you can use the internal audit for it. The next thing I'm going to show you is on another Fusion managed site that I have, which has, if you look at this status on the supplier, it has a different workflow. It's new, and you can set it to active without doing the audit, or you can initiate an audit.

So similar workspace, different workflows. As you can see, this one is forced through an audit while this one is easier or-- call it whatever. Yep, and it has different ways of showing the supplier review team.

As you can see, we have team in a matrix here, while in this other one, it's a list down. The reason I'm showing you these different options is for you to try and think about how you solve it in your company, and then think about how this fits to your company. How would you like to set this up if you had no limited-- unlimited options? Yep.

So I'll just set this customer supplier as active, and then that's fine. If it's active, and it turns out, after two years, your monetary risk or the revenue this supplier is creating on behalf of you, whatever, you would like to do an audit, just click the arrow, and then it will create the audit form for you.

In this case, I believe, the audit workflow and everything else is the same, yeah. It's the same, but opposite where the arrows are. Good.

So the third option I'm going to show you is from a customer of mine, which is called Vow ASA. It means "value of waste." They create really cool products and really high level of quality assurance for a company of their size and business.

So the supplier page, they do a risk-- a really short and sweet, easy risk analysis on the supplier when they create them just to help the different supply chain responsible, or the supplier owner responsible, to choose how often they should do an audit, what kind of audit they should do, if they're going to do an audit at all.

So if I create this with the highest risk as possible, that would mean, for this customer, that this supplier is a category A supplier, which needs to be audited every year. So when I submit this to review, I'm not going to do it because we're in a production tenant, but I have cheated a little bit, so it's here.

The audit form is quite extended compared to what comes out of the box, but it's, as mentioned earlier, it's very easy to create this for yourself. So they have categorized just a certification checklist. They are rating the different suppliers based on the operations, facilities, machines and equipment capability, use and management of the suppliers on a rating from 1 to 5, where 1 is a very low risk while 5 is a very high risk.

This goes on for many different kind of categories, and-- what's the word? I think you'll understand. And they do the same for HSEQ, where they take a look at the environmental and safety on the workplace, equality, process, maturity, SPC, tracked electronically formally. So those two are based on the out of the box, which we have seen earlier. Same as for formal change control process.

Rating the code of conduct, if they have ethical guidelines, et cetera, human and labor rights, environment, anti-corruption, ESG reporting mechanism, and now we're working on having a new section for IT as well. So I'll do their IT and cybersecurity work.

So you can start-- if you don't have any formal processes or procedures as of today, I would recommend to start really easy and then add more and more fields over the time. Cool, so I think I've mentioned flexibility a couple of times now. So to prove I'm not talking crap, I'll show you. So I have, in this first demo I showed you, I don't have any criticality level as a big list. There's no cycle or month on it. But I could add a picklist where the user or the responsible choose the criticality level, and then we have rule sets to this different criticality levels.

So in this case, if I choose criticality level 1, it will automatically put the cycle months on creation, I'll show you, for me. So I'll create a new one, and then level 1, demo AU23, demo 4, level 1.

Nothing in cycle months, and when I save it, it will say 36. And it's also possible to make sure that, if you change the criticality level, it also changes the cycle months, but that's not activated for now in this case.

So what I did was just to create a new field with a picklist with values that I have created my own, and then I've added different rules to these different levels and applied that these rules shall run when I create a supplier item. Good.

As you saw earlier with fields and two different workflows for the status, it's also possible to, when you grow bigger or your maturity increases, you can improve or create a more similar workflow like you have in reality. So this is just another example of a way of doing an audit.

So the audit is in a planning phase, where you, depending probably on the criticality level or the categorization of the supplier, you can submit an online questionnaire, which could be a SurveyMonkey or Microsoft Forms, an URL that gets automatically sent to your supplier, which they have to answer.

And when they have answered, you will review the results. If you are happy, then you are done with the audit. If you're not happy, and you would like to perform an on site audit, there was something in your online questionnaire that didn't make sense, you say to the system, I'm going there on site and look what's up.

So if I just open this workspace, and I'll show you what it means. So you see this one is the front end, which is the stuff that the normal user will see, and this is behind the scenes, where the Fusion360 Managed admins can upgrade and change stuff.

So I would like to create a third option, for instance, which is called AU23 Stuff, whatever. I would like it to happen from planning, and then submit. Give it a permission. You can have multiple permissions, so if your supplier is a part of the workflow, you can have a permission called supplier, which then again, you give this permission to the specific suppliers.

I'll just make this a little bit prettier, and then it's a fast track. Everything at AU goes fast, so let's fasten this one up as well. So as soon as I click Save, this new workflow is represented in the workspace frontend for all the users to see, ah, I got a new option, or the workflow is updated, and it doesn't affect any of the previous audits that has been done. It doesn't affect the state or whatever.

You can see the history. So that's a really cool feature where there's a lot of different options, which will be for you to read about in the class handout on the different transitions and all the automation stuff you can do in this action tab. Good.

So as we've seen, we have multiple ways of qualifying the supplier, qualifying, get notification on how often you should qualify the supplier, how you add responsibility to the supplier and how-- or who should do it and when. So you can see there are ways of managing the different dates and times. Just don't remember where it was.

That's cool.

[INAUDIBLE].

Go to the [INAUDIBLE] because if you have data in the system, you can create more from that data. So for instance, we have this list of how many days it is until audit. You see that this-- nothing is green, so I'm behind schedule on absolutely everything. Typical demo tenant.

As we saw in the [INAUDIBLE] tenant, we have more beautiful boxes, categorization flags, to increase the readability and the usage. So as soon as you update the supplier and put it under review, it changes the color and the flag, which then again updates the list, which I'm not allowed to show you in this case.

Having this data connected regarding your supplier means that you have an item inside of a system, which you can connect to different kind of other items like noncomformities, or you can connect it to claims or supply corrective action requests, do whatever.

So out of the box, when you buy Fusion Manage, you have automatically link to nonconformities, meaning if somebody create a nonconformity-- non-conformance report and add the supplier to it, it will be listed in the supplier workspace as well, meaning, again, it will be a lot easier to do the audit. Or if you're going to visit them or renegotiate prices, whatever, and you see that you have 50 different open NCRs, the supplier doesn't improve, then it's an indication maybe to change the supplier or find a new one, maybe scrap the whole product, or discuss with the supplier.

So this is one way of doing it. The way we're doing it for a while is to separate the different types of deviations into different subcategories. So any customer claim from VOW, where the reason of the claim is VOW supplier again, will be marked as a claim and then listed underneath this claims list, meaning how much does this supplier cost us in claims from our customer.

How many NCRs? How many supplier corrective action requests have we sent, whatever? Yeah, so you can connect everything.

Yes, so hopefully this wasn't too much information in a short time, and I hope you get the feeling of how you can use Fusion Manage as your supplier qualification tool and connect it to your products, your projects, and connect it to all of your quality management data.

So if this was cool, or if there's anything unclear, you're more than happy to send me an email, markus@addwise.no, or add me on LinkedIn and ask the questions there. So without any further ado, really glad you saw everything. Hope you enjoy the rest of your morning, day, or night, depending on where and when you are watching this. Thank you.