Approving Suppliers

I wanted to get some feedback on how some of you go about approving your suppliers to add to your Approved Supplier List. Lets assume this supplier is someone that has a direct effect on product realization so they have to be vetted/approved.

Specifically is this an internal process that you do and have approvers? So if one of your employees needed to use a new supplier, do you have internal documents that they fill out and provide reasoning to why they want to add the supplier, then your approver looks over these bits of information to give a yes or no?

Or would you send out a questionnaire to the supplier in question and have them answer what you want to know for approval?

 

In addition to the wise counsel you received from @Andy Nichols , I would recommend your organization considers what is meant by and benefit of, an "approved supplier list".
Remember, while a method and evidence must be established for recognizing a supplier, there is no specific requirement for a "list".
A list can indeed be very helpful, however, I have seen other less cumbersome methods (such as ....in some organizations an 'approval' or other such vetting needs to be done prior to establishing a supplier in the ERP (i.e. so they can get paid). In such cases, the ERP system itself can become the so-called "list".

Food for thought.

Hope this helps.
Be well.

 

The only issue we found with the ERP systems as "the list" is different vendors are subject to different requirements. The place that sells us pens goes thru almost zero vetting. Raw material suppliers go thru extensive vetting. We are able to categorize them in our ERP system, which helps. Thus an audit can cross reference those on the list with their records of vetting.

 

Thanks for the feedback everyone. We are a small group that when we approve suppliers, we mainly look to see if they are certified to any standard or if one of our customers asks us to use someone which is very rare. This process for approval is internal and the questions about the supplier are answered usually by our employee that is looking to add a supplier. These questions don't go out to our pending suppliers. We are not a manufacturing company so a lot of our vendors provide off the shelf items, occasionally we need some machine shop work or heat treat on something. I understand the PPAP and now the Aerospace APQP stuff which we don't do but just wondering if others went directly to the supplier in question. We are going to a managed software for our QMS and was running into some confusion on this internal vs. external verification process. I have only experienced what we do with our Quality procedures.