You're both right!
I worked for one of the world's biggest steelmakers for 15 years, 12 of those in quality, the past 6 in supplier quality assurance.
Ted is right when he says that "the standard is written for product and services", but I think Bpoole was probably referring more to the way the standard is
worded in some places - whilst it certainly
applies to suppliers of raw materials, it is clearly
aimed primarily at suppliers of parts and sub-assemblies (for example, 8.5.2.4 "The organisation shall analyse parts rejected by the customer's manufacturing plants, engineering facilities and dealerships...", or phrases such as Production Part Approval Process), for the reasons Bpoole states, i.e. "an automobile has between 15-17K parts and few raw materials".
My personal belief is that the supplier development section of the standard was not written with raw materials suppliers in mind.
Consider this comparison between two suppliers to an automotive manufacturer:
Supplier A supplies sealed unit headlamps
Supplier B supplies steel sheets
The customer incorporates the headlamp into the finished vehicle in its "as supplied" condition. The steel sheets are pressed into door panels, painted and attached to the car.
The question is - to what extent do Supplier A and Supplier B have to apply the Supplier Development clause of TS?
In my opinion, Supplier A has to apply the full weight of the clause back through the supply chain. The sealed unit headlamp is assembled from various parts purchased from sub-suppliers. The sub-supplier who manufactured the bulb in the headlamp unit may have purchased the filament from an even-lower tier supplier. In this case, the filament and bulb suppliers clearly have to be approved and developed in accordance with TS requirements, as their products appear in the finished vehicle in the as-supplied condition.
This, I believe, was the situation that the standard was written for.
However, Supplier B's suppliers (iron ore, coal, limestone etc.) have absolutely no impact at all on the steel sheets that are sold to the car maker. Variations in these raw materials are blended out long before the steel is even in liquid form. Final chemical trimming during steel making ensures that the steel is always at the correct chemical composition within fractions of a percent. Developing the ore suppliers has absolutely no value to the steel maker or the car maker. This doesn't mean we don't care about them - we monitor their quality, we penalise them financially if, say, the sulphur content is too high (not because it affects the finished product, but because we have to desulphurise the iron for longer when preparing it for steelmaking).
In short - the sub-suppliers of Supplier A can have a direct effect on the quality of the finished car, as they supply finished parts that are incorporated into the vehicle. The sub-suppliers of Supplier B can't, because their products are blended and altered physically and chemically under the control of Supplier B's TS-approved system.
I ran this past our registrar, and he accepted it as a sound strategy. I have yet to hear a solid argument against it, and also attended a seminar where I heard a representative from Jaguar state that they "didn't expect the company that supplies the steel to have its scrap suppliers developed".
Sorry to go on a bit, but this d*mn clause cost me 4 years of my life, and I have yet to meet two auditors who interpret it exactly the same.
Why? Because it just wasn't written with raw materials in mind...
