A Proposed Vendor Evaluation Profile

Abstract

Manufacturers depend on their vendors for furnishing procured material simple to complex in design and manufacture. At one end of the spectrum are items so simple, often purchased through jobbers, that only minimal expenditure of receiving inspection funds by the contractor may be warranted. At the other end of the spectrum is that group of items, extremely complex, often to new designs, involving unique manufacturing techniques and difficult to final inspect and test. It is true that one-shot devices, for example, are destructively tested in numbers sufficient to assure any desired level of reliability, and that there are final acceptance tests and life tests for repeatable devices and systems which are of great value as indicators for product quality; however, the contractor must supplement such information by an evaluation of the vendor's over-all quality program to be assured that the product was derived from a controlled program. This assurance should be evident long before results of destructive final acceptance and life test programs are available; this assurance must also be maintained on a continuing basis throughout the entire manufacturing and testing cycle. Thus, a vendor must have a means for isolating the weak elements in his general program for producingmore » the item, so that corrective action can be initiated to achieve and maintain a controlled operation. Also, and equally as important, the vendor must be able to isolate the elements of his program strengths, that they may be used.« less