Suppliers - Classifying Critical and Major suppliers & how to define them?

[Aaron Lupo]

HELP!!!
I would like some opinions and ideas on how your companies go about this.

As of right now we classify our suppliers Critical-we have to audit every 2 years unless they are ISO certified. Now this is how we define Critical- Material, service or equipment essential to the quality of testing and/or production which may be purchased from only one subcontractor. I think if we left the “may be purchased from only one subcontractor” part off it would be better, however I could see where managers would get confused and try to classify just about everything as critical.

So how do your companies classify Critical and Major suppliers, how do you define them, and how do you decide which ones you audit?

One way to clarify this is going back to your processes. Every process / product has a customer (internal or external). The customer requirements may or may not be documented. In the first case, that is your starting point. Put them in black and white and validate them with the customer. Then, go to your process and form a team with the persons involved. Put the requirements on the table and ask the team to identify the process characteristics -including materials- that affects the achievement of the requirements and the degree of importance of each. Once this is done, you extract the materials portion - the material and its relative importance and develop a list from critical to cosmetic and assign values to them. The suppliers of functional, safety related materials are usually considered critical. Other are just important or less critical. The supplier's degree of importance should be directly proportional to its importance on achieving customer satisfaction.

GG