Cases

Pal’s Sudden Service

By December 11, 2017 May 16th, 2020 No Comments

The CEO of Pal’s Sudden Service, a privately-owned quick-service restaurant chain that won a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 2001, explains supplier development.

‘They said a lot of the companies, given their size, can’t have any influence or major impact on their suppliers. And we told the people at NIST, “That’s wrong.”

We have a major influence on our suppliers. The first piece of “assess and improve” that we did was in the category of supplier relationships. We were in a situation where we had multiple suppliers. We had a redundancy factor. We also had competitive bidding going on. By using the criteria to assess and then going out and saying, “What are the best-known methods, and what are we doing?” we went from 21 suppliers to four. Our cost of goods reduced by 10 percent, which all dropped to the bottom line.’

Quality Digest, June 2002, Baldrige Award