Rub­ber & Plas­tics: Glob­al sourc­ing is
not always the best pro­cure­ment strategy

One thing must be made clear from the out­set: Ger­man sup­pli­ers are not fun­da­men­tal­ly bet­ter than inter­na­tion­al ones. There are also excel­lent rub­ber, plas­tics and tool pro­duc­ers in oth­er coun­tries that sup­ply top-qual­i­ty goods. In addi­tion, inter­na­tion­al sup­pli­ers often have brand­ed prod­ucts from large cor­po­ra­tions in their port­fo­lio, the qual­i­ty of which is the same all over the world.

How­ev­er, the prices of these top sup­pli­ers are also cor­re­spond­ing­ly high for local con­di­tions, which con­tra­dicts the inten­tions of glob­al sourc­ing. It makes lit­tle sense to trans­port goods halfway around the world if the pur­chase price is ulti­mate­ly the same as what a Ger­man man­u­fac­tur­er would have charged. Those who pur­chase goods from over­seas usu­al­ly do so in order to reduce costs. And this is almost always at the expense of quality.

The issue here is not the gen­er­al lev­el of qual­i­ty, but con­sis­ten­cy. The dimen­sion­al tol­er­ances of low-cost inter­na­tion­al sup­pli­ers are often much high­er than Ger­man com­pa­nies are used to. For exam­ple, it is com­mon for the Shore hard­ness of rub­ber sheets to be spec­i­fied with a tol­er­ance of ±5 points. In con­trast, tol­er­ances of ±10 points are very often applied to export goods, which can result in large dif­fer­ences for the cus­tomer. Thus, one batch of wash­ers may have a hard­ness of 75 Shore and the next a hard­ness of 60 Shore, even though both have passed the supplier’s qual­i­ty test.

For pro­duc­tion, such high vari­a­tion is prob­lem­at­ic. Euro­pean stan­dards and reg­u­la­tions in par­tic­u­lar leave lit­tle room for vari­a­tion. How­ev­er, this fact is often dif­fi­cult to com­mu­ni­cate to over­seas sup­pli­ers. From their point of view, the require­ments of Ger­man cus­tomers seem metic­u­lous, which makes coor­di­na­tion even more difficult.