Tognum recognizes its best suppliers

• Supplier Awards for raw components, finished components and most-improved supplier of the year
• Criteria: quality, logistics, competitiveness and environmental protection
• Cooperation with globally-active suppliers increasingly important

Friedrichshafen, 1 July 2011. At the end of June, Tognum, the specialist for propulsion and power solutions, distributed Supplier Awards for the year 2010 to its most outstanding suppliers. “We aim to develop solid, long-term partnerships with our suppliers because they make a valuable contribution to the success of our company,” explained Dr. Ulrich Dohle, Tognum Executive Board member responsible for Technology & Operations. “We expect a continuous optimization of products and processes from our suppliers and we have accordingly recognized those suppliers who set standards for us in 2010.”

The award for best supplier of finished components went to the Baden-Württemberg engineering company Spaichingen GmbH which has been supplying control components for mtu Series 2000 engines for many years. A previous Tognum Supplier award-winner on several occasions, Gienanth GmbH from Eisenberg, was named best supplier of raw components in recognition, among other things, of the outstanding quality of the crankcases it supplies for mtu Series 4000. Tognum’s ‘Rising Star’ for 2010 was engine valve manufacturer Märkisches Werk GmbH from Halver which achieved the greatest improvement over the previous year’s performance in all categories.

The essential criteria for evaluation are quality, logistics and competitiveness together with the new criterion “environmental protection” which was introduced at the beginning of 2010 and requires verification in the form of certification such as ISO 14001. Tognum promotes intensive cooperation with its suppliers by insisting that its development, suppliers and value analysis sections work together to create increasingly cost-efficient solutions for components. “Since we introduced our Supplier Awards in 2005, our suppliers have placed great store by their evaluations and have worked to achieve continuous improvement,” said Head of Purchasing at Tognum, Erik Manning. “That has led to an overall and ongoing improvement in the performance of all our suppliers.”

The 2010 award winners were selected from more than 1,000 suppliers with whom Tognum subsidiaries placed orders last year. The expansion of the worldwide production network has seen an increase in the importance of global suppliers and this is why the company is particularly keen to promote cooperation with suppliers who operate on an international basis and who can react flexibly and fast to meet demand from Tognum production locations such as Aiken (USA) and Suzhou (China).