Mark and Ninja, thanks for your replies.
Our problem is not supplier section, rather our problem is too many qualified suppliers for a category of parts. Managing many suppliers takes too much time and we likely loose pricing and service advantages from concentrating our business with a limited list of suppliers.
I am interested in having a base of general knowledge to better help me understand best practices and criteria other than on time delivery, capability, quality, and cost that might be used to narrow our list of suppliers for new business. (Existing work will stay with the current supplier.)
Looking at performance data (on time delivery and quality) there are a couple of obvious candidates to drop, but for the most part supplier performance and capability meets our needs. We service the high end of the market so cost is usually less important than quality and on time delivery.
We are a high mix job shop buying smaller quantities of most parts. We do not design what we manufacture; our customers are design responsible. Some purchased parts are custom and some are off the shelf, although the present effort is focused on custom parts.
For one category, we have about double the number of active suppliers we think we need, and about triple the number we need if approved but not recently used suppliers are included.
Within the category, we need some suppliers for difficult work and easier work. Suppliers for difficult work are often not cost competitive for easy work. There are two types of products within the category.Suppliers of one type are often not competitive in the other type. As a job shop, we feel we need to be able to get three bids for new work, which leads to 9-12 suppliers within the category, assuming a supplier or two may be able to check more than one box.
