Actuator Manufacturer

Both Automek’s decision to source actuator and Agile’s decision to manufacture actuators was in the interest of their businesses. Automek was able to reduce substantial costs and agile was able to make new revenue in roads in north American market. For a growing company it’s very difficult to ignore new business opportunities especially when there are few reasons to doubt on quality based on past record. Agile could have done well in understanding more about its capabilities and making more stringent procedural checks where chance of human error or failure of other regular quality check is high. However, automek should have taken quality issues more stringently especially when they knew it is first time that agile would be making such product. Also, Agile was doing more than what might be required of managing all the vendors where there was little support from Automek. It could have asked Automek to provide more support in auditing the other two suppliers. Although, agile had good track record in terms of quality but novelty of the product coupled with new tier 2 and tier 3 suppliers who have limited experience for the quality standards required in north American market and who would have low margins on the product should have triggered some alarm bells at least to audit the quality of tier 3 and 4 suppliers.
Partly, Agile was also responsible for such failure as it was agile’s decision to source PCB from ECPL who has very different standards as compared to what required for automation industry. Although all the stakeholders appears to flag ISO 9000 certification but evidently this cannot ask for complacency in quality checks especially when reports from external engineers have proved lapses in quality and processes in various areas.
Automek seems to be majorly responsible for not able to keep quality check on all its suppliers in its need for making better profits. It didn’t send engineers to setup new product manufacturing at Agile’s facility and then made