Dedicated procurement and supplier management team

Our dedicated procurement and supplier management team maps out our materials planning, manages our global network of material/component suppliers, and negotiates pricing for raw materials and components.

Due to material shortages, extended lead times, and lack of raw materials, we are actively looking to install redundancy into our supply chain and diversify our supplier options where available to avoid disruptions to volume production.

Intelligent procurement

With more than 20 years of experience in purchasing materials, our procurement team has developed strict knowledge management processes to analyze unit cost, order quantity, pricing, inflation, and raw material consumption to optimize and guide our purchasing decisions.

In addition to developing our procurement and inventory databases, we utilize QAD manufacturing software to build a cost-effective evaluation of pricing to judge our suppliers.

Supplier vetting

At the outset of identifying potential supplier partners, we perform an extensive evaluation to determine whether suppliers comply with or exceed our strict ESG requirements.

Production, processing, or assembly of a quality component and pricing are important to us, but we also spend substantial time to understand whether financial solvency, facilities operation, employee treatment, and quality management processes meet our requirements.

A key aspect of our evaluation often involves site visits, meetings with management, and understanding their own (often opaque) supply chains. After we have collected sufficient information and feel comfortable that suppliers meet conformance to our ESG and quality control requirements, we begin the working relationship.

Supplier quality control

We install several safeguards into our manufacturing process to protect against faulty materials, which also applies to our supplier network.

During the supplier vetting phase, we customarily request our suppliers provide working samples for us to evaluate if the supplier possesses the necessary machinery, skills, and techniques to produce requested components at high volume.

This period is often a combination of an evaluation alongside an opportunity to “teach” our suppliers how to create the components we need through iterative working rounds, testing samples, and critiquing where necessary. Ultimately, we hold our suppliers to the same quality standards we expect from our finished products.