Sup­pli­er selec­tion for rub­ber and plas­tic —

What should you look out for?

At the basic process lev­el, sup­pli­er selec­tion is the same in all com­pa­nies. The pur­chas­ing depart­ment first research­es poten­tial sup­pli­ers for the mate­ri­als (based on inter­nal or exter­nal infor­ma­tion) and cre­ates a short list. It then looks in detail at all the man­u­fac­tur­ers on this list, cross­es off those that turn out to be unsuit­able, and selects the sup­ply part­ner who best meets the indi­vid­ual deci­sion criteria.

The sec­ond phase, sup­pli­er eval­u­a­tion, is par­tic­u­lar­ly chal­leng­ing in rub­ber and plas­tics pro­cess­ing. The rea­son for this is the low degree of stan­dard­iza­tion of these materials.

In the met­al sec­tor, there are firm­ly defined prod­ucts, for exam­ple steel grades, which always have the same prop­er­ties. Pur­chas­ing can there­fore con­cen­trate on find­ing a sup­pli­er who offers the mate­r­i­al required by the design at the most favor­able conditions.

With rub­ber and plas­tics, this is only the case to a lim­it­ed extent. Both plas­tics and elas­tomers are mate­ri­als with a wide range of prop­er­ties that depend on their spe­cif­ic com­po­si­tion. Although there are stan­dard­ized prod­ucts (for exam­ple, cer­tain types of sil­i­cone) that sup­pli­ers also have in their port­fo­lio across the board, these are not suit­able for all areas of application.

As a rule, cus­tomers need rub­ber com­pounds or plas­tics that are indi­vid­u­al­ly tai­lored to their needs, depend­ing on para­me­ters such as ambi­ent tem­per­a­tures, mechan­i­cal loads or vibrations.

Only a few man­u­fac­tur­ers are able to design rub­ber and plas­tic arti­cles that ade­quate­ly meet their cri­te­ria. This is because the core com­pe­ten­cies of most man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies tend to lie in the met­al sec­tor. They sim­ply lack the know-how to deal with plas­tics or elas­tomers. If they do need a cor­re­spond­ing com­po­nent, whether plas­tic parts, com­pos­ite parts or mold­ed rub­ber parts, they call on the con­sult­ing ser­vices of their sup­pli­ers. This cir­cum­stance should also be reflect­ed in the selec­tion of suppliers.