Supplier Management: 6 Checks Before a Shop Gets Your Part

“What steps do you take to manage your suppliers?” is a question we hear more often as customers look harder at their own supply chains. It’s a fair one to ask anyone who places your work with outside shops. Every company that outsources says its suppliers are vetted. The useful answer is what “vetted” means in practice: what gets checked, by whom, how often, and what happens when a shop slips.

Here are the six checks a job passes through before a shop in our network makes your part, and the supplier management practices behind them.

1. Qualification before the first drawing

No shop sees a PE drawing until it has been qualified. Shops complete our supplier qualification survey covering equipment, materials, inspection capability, certifications, quality system, and capacity. We review the answers, verify certifications, and talk with the shop before approval.

This mirrors how quality professionals describe supplier selection generally: a desktop review, an assessment of quality system and process capability, and sample approval before a supplier is added to the approved list. We wrote more about what that means in practice in Vetted Manufacturing Vendor Network: What the Phrase Actually Means.

2. Approval scoped to what the shop has proven

Approval isn’t all-or-nothing. A shop is approved for the processes, materials, and tolerance ranges it has demonstrated. A shop with a strong record in aluminum milling isn’t automatically approved for titanium, welding, or ±0.0005″ work. Controlled work has its own bar: shops receiving ITAR or CUI drawings must be set up to handle them.

Scoped approval is what keeps an approved supplier list meaningful. A list that says “approved” without saying “for what” doesn’t tell a buyer much.

3. Matching the job to the shop this week

Each job is placed based on the part’s requirements and on the shop’s current load, material on hand, and recent performance. A shop that’s excellent but overbooked is the wrong choice for a tight date. Capacity changes week to week and rarely shows up on a website, which we covered in Capacity Doesn’t Show Up on a Vendor’s Website.

4. Requirements flowed down on every order

Every purchase order carries the drawing revision, material and certification requirements, special process requirements, inspection requirements, and any customer-specific clauses. Shops may not change material, process, or sub-tier vendors without our written approval.

Flow-down is required under ISO 9001:2015 clause 8.4.3 and spelled out in more detail in AS9100D. A process change notification rule matters most: a shop that quietly moves your plating to a new vendor can change your part without changing your drawing.

5. First article and inspection on every lot

New parts and revised parts get a first article inspection, documented to AS9102 when the program requires it. After that, parts come back to San Clemente for inspection before they ship to you. Inspecting in one place, after finishing, means we measure the part you’ll actually receive, including coating buildup on critical features.

6. Scorecards, corrective action, and requalification

Every order adds to each shop’s record. We track on-time delivery and quality results, and that record decides where future work goes.

The metrics are the ones quality engineers use industry-wide. Defect rate is often expressed in parts per million: 20 rejects out of 80,000 parts delivered is 250 PPM. On-time delivery needs a clear definition, measured against the original promise date rather than a renegotiated one.

When a part misses spec, we contain the lot, work with the shop on root cause, and track the corrective action until it’s verified effective. Repeat issues move a shop to conditional status or off the list. A shop that’s been inactive or changed ownership, equipment, or key people may need to requalify. See The Requalification Follow-Up for what that involves.

Why this matters more across a network

A single buyer working with three or four shops sees each one’s performance on a handful of orders. A coordinator placing work across a network sees patterns across many jobs: which shop holds tight bores in titanium, which one’s anodizer runs thick, which one slips every December. That history is the core advantage of a managed network over sending each job to whoever quotes lowest.

It also helps with supply risk. If a shop goes down, a qualified backup for that process is already on the list, so a job can move without starting qualification from scratch.

Questions to ask any supplier about supplier management

1. How is a new shop qualified before it receives work?
2. Is approval scoped by process, material, and tolerance?
3. What gets flowed down on purchase orders, and can a shop change sub-tier vendors without approval?
4. Where and when are parts inspected?
5. Which supplier performance metrics do you track, and how do they affect placement?
6. What happens to a shop after a nonconformance?

For aerospace and defense programs, also ask how ITAR and CUI drawings are controlled at each shop. PE is AS9100D Compliant, ISO 9001:2015, ITAR Registered, and NIST 800-171 Compliant; details are on our compliance page and our vendor network page.