Supply chain Quality Management (SCQM) emerged as product quality issues expanded beyond an organization and into its supply chain. In SCQM, first-rate suppliers play a vital role in determining the buyer’s competitiveness and success. Previous SCQM studies, however, only focus on the need for SCQM, rendering supplier selection largely unexamined. This research fills in that gap by identifying quality, cost, flexibility, delivery, and the relative importance of these factors as the criteria for supplier selection and providing empirical analysis of the criteria for improving SCQM outcomes. With 217 automotive parts manufacturers categorized into three SCQM groups where the high-performing group contains 40, the moderately-performing group 145, and the low-performing group 32 manufacturers, we run a Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) and an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). First, MANOVA results in the importance of the selection factors show a significant difference in quality, cost, and delivery at the 5% significance level across the three SCQM groups whereas flexibility has no statistical significance. Second, AHP results of the relative importance of the selection factors across the three performance groups show that quality, delivery, and cost must be taken into account before flexibility to improve SCQM. Findings in this study elucidate the implications of aligning the strategic direction between buyers and suppliers for improving the overall SCQM performance and competitiveness.