TTI Quality

Realizing that commitment to quality begins at the top; CEO Paul Andrews chairs the monthly Total Quality Management Forum, comprised of the senior staff, which analyzes quality data by key functional areas and by component manufacturer. The Forum then establishes quality levels, launches new initiatives and reinforces quality efforts and training.

ISO 9001:2000 and AS9100B Registered – TTI’s Global System

TTI was the first distributor to have all locations ISO registered. This registration ensures customers consistent quality and service levels throughout TTI’s global organization and enables TTI to be a qualified supplier to companies in the European community and most other countries around the world. The company later upgraded its Quality Management System to ISO 9001:2000 and AS9100B. TTI has invested heavily to develop a single global operating system that truly makes TTI’s quality and service levels consistently high around the globe. As a major supplier to the aerospace industry, TTI’s registration to the AS9100B Quality Management System clearly demonstrates our long-term commitment and support of this market segment.

Superior Quality Levels — TTI Total Quality Process

Today’s competitive global market environment requires the highest quality products and services provided with the greatest efficiencies and productivity levels. TTI is a quality and cost-effectiveness leader that provides industry-leading quality and on-time delivery to help reduce customer costs.

In 1989 TTI addressed the challenge to move order accuracy and timeliness to substantially higher levels by adopting the Total Quality Management (TQM) program. TTI’s comprehensive Total Quality Process involves TTI’s internal operations, its component manufacturers and its customers. All TTI locations have ongoing quality improvement teams that systematically research and analyze monthly performance data using the analytical tools to most effectively improve quality.

Overall quality improved to 99.77% in 2004, and the company’s strong efforts continue to drive results closer to six sigma (100 percent). In addition to systems improvements, TTI’s culture has helped make the TTI Total Quality Management program successful.

TTI’s high on-time delivery performance reduces customers’ overall inventory costs, which include: the cost of capital, warehousing costs, inventory shrinkage, obsolescence, inventory insurance, property tax, safety stock levels, expediting costs and line shut-down costs. These costs are all reduced with lower inventory costs made possible by higher on-time delivery performance. If a customer used six suppliers with an average on-time delivery rate of 93%, the overall effective on-time delivery rate would be 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 = 64.7%. Since TTI can supply 75% or more of the components on a PC board, using TTI to handle the products of all six suppliers, with an on-time delivery performance of 97.56%, provides a substantial overall on-time improvement and the accompanying inventory cost savings.

Warehouse Management System (WMS)

TTI has committed substantial resources to technologies that enable TTI employees to continually set record-breaking quality levels. Computerizing and automating operations has steadily and dramatically raised warehouse quality, which reduced TTI errors to unprecedented levels below 200 PPM in 2003 and 2004.

Quality Through Training

TTI’s operation training program is structured so that each department has a dedicated trainer who has been certified through TTI’s “Train the Trainer Program.” The trainer works side by side with each new employee to answer questions and to help new employees fine-tune their processes.

Once an employee is completely trained, he or she has the opportunity to become a non-inspect certified processor. To be non-inspect certified a processor must have no more than one error for every 10,000 lines processed over a 3-month rolling average. Currently, nearly half of TTI’s order processors are non-inspect certified. This is just another way TTI demands and rewards high quality standards, and illustrates TTI’s employees’ commitment to high quality.

Delivering the Correct Parts

Customers have minimized inventory levels to substantially reduce costs, which significantly increased the importance of on-time delivery. TTI’s extensive resources enable TTI customers to maintain efficient production operations with reduced inventories. TTI’s automated order fulfillment process triggers orders to be pulled and shipped to meet the customers’ requested delivery windows. Management and warehouse personnel are dedicated to setting the pace in the industry via continued improvement.

TTI is able to provide value-added services that eliminate incoming inspections at the customer’s site. Dock-to-stock and ship-to-stock programs reduce acquisition, handling and inventory costs. From traditional bond inventories to more complex in-plant store environments, TTI has custom supply chain management programs to reduce customer inventories and streamline the purchasing process, enabling the customer to focus on more cost-intensive areas.

Benchmarking Customer Satisfaction

Quality and on-time delivery statistics are important measures of internal performance results, but to ensure that TTI’s internal measurements match or exceed the customers’ satisfaction levels, TTI annually surveys its customers to determine customer perception on 16 key items relating to TTI performance. Benchmarking customer satisfaction and identifying the customers’ highest priority areas for improvement are crucial for the company to focus its resources on the requirements deemed most critical by our customers.

TTI also surveys its manufacturers’ representatives each year to provide our best total team effort to our customers. The 70% response on the representative survey helps direct an open dialogue with each representative group and each manufacturer, providing better focus on our partnership development for specific improvements to our customers.

Component Manufacturer Quality Management

To reinforce all the links in its supply chain, TTI’s Total Quality System tracks quality and on-time performance results by TTI manufacturer. Each manufacturer is measured on incoming defects, customer-reported defects and purchase order on-time analysis. Monthly performance reports are sent to all manufacturers with both their own personalized performance results and the results of other TTI manufacturers. Consequently, all TTI manufacturers know their performance relative to all other TTI manufacturers each month. This open information process stimulates dialogue, maintains an active, ongoing process and enhances substantive efforts to improve overall quality and on-time performance levels.

TTI Manufacturer Excellence Program

TTI presents its prestigious Manufacturer Excellence Award to qualifying TTI manufacturers each year. This comprehensive evaluation is part of TTI’s Manufacturer Quality Management effort and is based on factors designed to drive the TTI manufacturer relationship to higher levels of customer satisfaction through higher levels of quality and on-time delivery. The award evaluation has stimulated TTI manufacturers to benchmark their own performance based on the TTI Excellence Recognition

Program points received in the various categories. Since the inception of the awards, competition to qualify for the awards has sparked intense efforts by manufacturers to improve their quality performance.

Electronic Component Distributor – TTI, Inc.