We seek partnerships with suppliers who have a strong safety culture, reliable operations, quality goods and services, competitive pricing, strong cost-management skills, innovative business solutions, and a strong customer focus. Potential suppliers are evaluated based on compliance, financial, health, environment and safety, capability and information protection risks.
Qualification process
When you register to become a supplier, you can expect the following process:
Supplier capability and information survey
You will receive a supplier capability and information survey, as well as a supplier confidentiality agreement. Completion of both documents is required. While we recognize that not all questions apply to every supplier, you will be evaluated on the questions that do apply to your supplier type and commodity offered.
When we review your survey, we will be evaluating your abilities in the following areas (where applicable):
- Current delivery performance (based on 100% on-time expectations)
- Quality performance
- Commodity compatibility with our product needs
- Availability of capital to produce evaluation products
- Financial strength for future growth and investment
- Registration in an industry sector quality system, such as ISO 9001
- Ability to provide inspection, testing, and design analysis, if required
- Support of state-of-the-art equipment and processing
- Technical and management strengths
- Understanding and compliance of industry sector requirements
- History of competitiveness for this commodity
- Ability to manage prototype/pre-production activities
- Ability to handle logistics
- Use of continuous improvement and advanced quality planning techniques
- Adequately automated/error-proofed manufacturing processes
- Conflict mineral audits
On-site audit
If you receive a passing score on the supplier capability and information survey, we will schedule an on-site audit visit. The on-site audit reconfirms the information received in the survey, based on both interviews with supplier staff and an evaluation of the supplier place of business. Note that no on-site audit is required if we determine that the commodity meets the following requirements:
- Low technology
- Off-the-shelf part
- Low cost of material
- Low number of items requested
The supplier quality auditor will prepare a final audit report and review the results with the sourcing team.
Notification and further steps
After the audit report is reviewed and evaluated, the sourcing team will determine if you are selected as a supplier. You will receive a formal notification of your acceptance or rejection.
If you are accepted, you will be added to our approved supplier list. At that time, you will be asked to complete request for proposals for our future sourcing needs.