Continental Honors Top Suppliers – and Particularly Their Contributions to Quality Assurance

• Twelve suppliers honored as suppliers of the year
• Additional Quality Award 2015 presented
• “Top technology comes from top quality”

Dresden, Regensburg, July 1, 2016. The competition is high, and every year the outcome is eagerly anticipated: Which company from among the 800 or so strategic suppliers of technology company Continental will be named supplier of the year in the automotive business? Recently at the Supplier Day 2016, which was held at Dresden’s Ostrapark exhibition center, a total of 13 companies were honored for their fantastic achievements based on a comprehensive, systematic assessment process. The event was held under the motto “2016 – The Year of Supplier Quality.”

In front of around 400 guests from all over the world, Dr. Elmar Degenhart, Continental’s chairman of the Executive Board, said in his speech: “The demands our customers place on us are rising all the time. As a result our solutions for this are becoming more complex. After all, electrification of the powertrain, automation of driving functions and advanced digitalization, as well as new business models for advanced mobility services require superior quality, close connectivity, and increasing cross-industry collaboration. Many customers also rely on platform concepts. Consequently, the entire supply chain is feeling the effects of these increased, and in some cases new requirements when it comes to quality and reliability. This is why we involve our suppliers in our solutions development and quality assurance processes as extensively and as early as possible. For this reason, at Continental, quality management for suppliers was recently assigned to the purchasing department, which works particularly closely with our suppliers. At the end of the day, only by working together we can achieve technology leadership and superior competitiveness.”

For its automotive business, Continental procures 135 billion individual components a year from a total of 4,000 suppliers at some 100 production locations worldwide. Günter Fella, Head of Purchasing, said: “Every quality issue is also a logistical disruption, which can quickly turn into a supply bottleneck – since our products have an average material proportion of 50 percent. With our special inspection procedures, which supplement the traditional approvals process, we enable our suppliers to manufacture and supply their components to precisely match our requirements.”

The Supplier of the Year Awards have been presented since 2008 by the three Continental divisions, Chassis & Safety, Powertrain, and Interior. These awards are now renowned across the entire industry. They are based on a complex evaluation process, whereby Continental assesses its strategic suppliers in the automotive business all year round against a list of defined criteria. It includes the categories Quality, Technology, Logistics, Costs, and Purchasing Conditions. Awards are presented in the six fields of Electronics, Electromechanics, Mechanics & Raw Material, Plastics & Rubber, and Investment & Engineering Services in addition to division-specific categories.

For the last six years already, along with these regular award categories, there has also been a special Quality Award that honors exceptional performance in terms of quality improvement and supports Continental’s high expectations when it comes to quality. In Dresden, the Quality Award 2015 went to the company MS-Schramberg, which supplies Continental with magnets.

In the Electronics category, NDK (frequency devices) and Rohm (broadline electronics) were named Supplier of the Year 2015, while in the Electromechanics category the award went to Schlaeger (mechatronic inductors). In the Mechanics & Raw Material category, Xunhui (casting) and Zhenjiang Xianfeng (stamped rolled assemblies) were honored; in the Plastics & Rubber category the awards were given to Iriso (connectors) and Senju (product-related auxiliaries). The awards for Investment and Engineering Services went to ZSI (engineering services) and Strama (assembly production for electronic manufacturing). The companies that received awards for specific solutions for the individual divisions were as follows: for Chassis & Safety, Alcoa (aluminum extrusion and precision machining); for Interior, Eurac (aftermarket); and for Powertrain, Dae Dong Metal Finishing (surface treatment).