Like shiny medals on a soldier's tunic, having a manufacturing facility independently certified to international quality standards such as ISO9001, ISO14001, ISO13485, TS16945 and Nadcap, assures customers that their outsourcing partner can be trusted with their 'baby' and is a safe pair of hands.
According to PartnerTech, which has multiple manufacturing facilities across the UK, Europe and Asia, the display of a quality or environmental accreditation is not just a poster on the wall, it is a demonstration that an independent organisation has examined all aspects of manufacturing and testing and that consistency of service is assured.
"When a customer is looking to outsource production he needs to have the confidence and assurance that the quality, availability, and consistency of service will be as good, if not better, than he can do for himself," explains Mike Goodall, quality manager for PartnerTech's Cambridge and King's Lynn facilities. "Quality accreditations are a valid and consistent benchmark against which a potential service provider can be judged."
So what specific purpose do they serve? And does having a particular accreditation win you business? According to Goodall, they demonstrate to the customer that you can 'walk the walk' and they provide a benchmark by which prospective customers can assess potential partners.
"Without the key accreditations that we hold, potential customers would not even pick up the phone," said Goodall. "A recent prospect, some 200 miles away, requested a sales presentation on their site. This included photographs of our factory, equipment, production facilities, and a list of quality certifications. This customer is now placing business with us having never visited our site. Why? Because we have accreditations in place that demonstrate we do what we say we can do, and, by reputation, do it well."
Goodall stressed that without accreditations, a customer would have to inspect or audit any number of potential contract manufacturers before they could objectively decide the competence and capability each could provide. “Quality and environmental accreditations provide the yardstick to make this assessment easier, more accurate, more objective, quicker and therefore less expensive."
So what quality standards are most important for contract manufacturers and why? According to George Llewellyn, who is the quality manager at PartnerTech’s Poole facility, the baseline is being certified to the two generic ISO management system standards - ISO 9001:2000 for quality and ISO 14001:2004 for the environment.
"These two standards are the baseline and demonstrate that we integrate quality into the business processes, improve effectiveness via numerical measurement of the usefulness of tasks, strive for continual process improvement and track customer satisfaction. On the environmental side, ISO 14001 demonstrates that we are doing all we can to minimise the negative impact that our operations have on the environment by reducing our carbon footprint, waste, and potential to pollute."
What about industry-specific accreditations? Like many other UK-based contract manufacturers, PartnerTech’s business is focused on meeting the needs of telecommunications, medical, aerospace, defence, automotive and industrial equipment companies. According to Llewellyn, it is becoming increasingly important to build on the ISO 9001 standard and to gain industry-specific accreditations such as ISO 13485:2003 for the medical market, AS/E N9100:2003 or Nadcap for the defence and aerospace sectors, and TL9000 or BABT340 for telecoms.
"At Poole, we have a number of customers that place telecoms work with us in the knowledge that we have BABT340 certification for the manufacture of many product types," added Llewellyn. “Similarly, in the medical market, our accreditation to ISO13485 has attracted new customers to the business."
A growing number of equipment suppliers in the aerospace and defence market, including Boeing, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Rolls Royce, have put their weight behind Nadcap, known formerly as the National Aerospace and Defence Contractors Accreditation Programme.
Part of the Performance Review Institute, Nadcap is a worldwide cooperative programme of major companies designed to manage a cost-effective consensus approach to special processes and products and provide continual improvement within the aerospace, defence and automotive industries. Being Nadcap-accredited is becoming a prerequisite for contract manufacturers working in partnership with member companies who support or sponsor their suppliers' certification.
"Nadcap's vision is to provide unbiased manufacturing process and product assessments and certification services with the view of adding value, reducing total cost and facilitating relationships between prime contractors and suppliers," added Llewellyn. "Nadcap is a step on from ISO 9001 and AS9100 as it is highly technical and focuses on industry specific processes, parts and products rather than generic systems."
"We see Nadcap as a major differentiator as it provides contract manufacturers with credibility in the aerospace and defence market generally, and it gives member companies, that is the primes, confidence that their supplier has been audited to cooperatively agreed specifications."
PartnerTech's Goodall believes quality certifications, such as Nadcap, are worth the investment as they provide the framework for continual improvement and, in some cases, help to differentiate one contract manufacturer from another.
"We offer tier one product lifecycle solutions to the larger electronics OEMs and these kind of customers expect all the appropriate boxes on the multiple-page requests for quotation (RFQs) to be ticked," added Goodall. "We just wouldn’t get a sniff at certain work without the appropriate quality certifications."
The overriding priority for contract manufacturers, according to Goodall, is achieving operational excellence, and, through this, enhancing customers' profitability and competitiveness.
"Having the shiny medals, a lean enterprise, six sigma, being customer-focused and investing in the latest production equipment and new technology are all vital for the development of a quality culture," concluded Goodall. "But, the very best companies have that certain something or je ne sais quoi for which there is, as yet, no tick box on the RFQ document or quality standard to describe."
