Collaborative quality management system among mulitple entities in supply chain

Product quality is the crucial factor for enterprise's survival in competitive market. In earlier days, quality management is primarily confined to a single enterprise since manufacturing is localized and separate. In the new era of electronic commerce and global economy, multiple entities collaborate to deliver a product to the end-customer, and the competitions between enterprises convert to competitions between supply chains. In such a scenario. the quality of a product today depends not only on the activities carried out oil it within the enterprise but also at every stage in the value chain. This gives rise to a new challenge for quality management of product lifecycle. This paper discusses the specialities of supply chain quality management, namely a multi-tier. multi-cycle. multi-dimension complex system whose objective is to implement synchronous and collaborative transparent online quality control and assurance. Then it puts forward a conceptual framework of collarative quality management information system during the whole product lifecycle, gives a system architecture based oil mulit-agent and illustrates CORBA-based software implementation architecture of collaborative quality control.