New Casting Supplier System Assessment - What technical questions to ask?

[Quality 13]

Hello all!

I'm looking for assistance with compiling some questions for a new supplier audit I will be leading.
First, this will be my first time auditing a supplier and I'm not sure what questions to ask. I've found an assessment that the company uses but it very general:
How many employees
Union non-union
Minority own etc

I'm looking for some specific questions for this supplier. They will be supplying us with castings for Industrial purposes (bearings).

Besides general business questions can you please reply with direct casting questions I can add to my assessment?

Kind regards,

Quality 13

 

[Jim Wynne]

You're in an unenviable position. It seems to me that if your company wants a technical evaluation, they would provide technical expertise on the audit team. Is there no one in your company who's familiar with casting processes? There's little to be gained from asking technical questions if you're not in a position to evaluate the answers.

 

[Golfman25]

Respectfully, you have no idea what they are doing. So specific casting questions would be useless. IMO your best bet would be to have questions regarding how they will meet what you need. So a bunch of "how do you" questions would be beneficial.

How do you do _____? Or show me how you do ______? Hit the areas that are important to you:

inspections and quality
Order processing and delivery scheudules
what do they do if they run into a production problem
etc.

 

[Sidney Vianna]

If you have similar suppliers you already do business with, you can ask people from incoming quality, production, purchasing, engineering, etc...what types of problems similar castings (and it's suppliers) bring to your organization.

Based on these "failure modes"/challenges, you should be able to develop questions that would provide you with an insight on how robust this new supplier's processes are, in order to avoid the problems encountered with similar vendors.

Now, as in any assessment, there is only value in performing it, if you can assess the adequacy of responses and evidence at hand. Otherwise, as others mentioned in this thread, it is a waste of time. Being a second party audit, can you bring “experts” from your own company along? They could provide you with the technical “ammunition” for the audit.