Continental awards top Automotive Group suppliers

At its 2017 Supplier Day, Continental’s Automotive Group honoured 15 companies with Supplier of the Year awards for their performance during the 2016 production year. Contenders from the more than 2,700 series suppliers whose components Continental used last year were evaluated in the 15 category awards for quality, technology, costs and purchasing conditions and logistics. The category winners were awarded by Dr Elmar Degenhart, chairman of Continental AG’s Executive Board, and Günter Fella, head of purchasing at Continental Automotive.

“Both the developments within the automobile industry, the increasingly complex global platform concepts and our customers’ growing expectations in terms of quality all present new challenges for the entire supply chain,” said Degenhart in his speech. “Quality is now no longer a goal in the sense of an indicator of customer satisfaction but an absolute must. Adopting a systematic zero-defects strategy in all areas is a clear objective for our work. For this reason, all companies in the supply chain must make this standard of quality an integral part of their DNA so that all employees put it into practice every day and it characterises every single process step.”

Last year, the Continental Automotive Group processed around 120 billion components at its 100 or so production sites around the world. “Our catalogue of supplied components contained more than 120,000 part numbers last year,” Fella commented. “This complexity means very tough requirements, not just for quality but also for logistics. That is especially true since it is nowadays becoming more and more important to be able to respond quickly and flexibly to changes in demand.”

The 15 product categories in which the Supplier of the Year 2016 awards were presented can be broken down into the following five general field, as well as three division-specific fields: Electronics, Electro-Mechanics, Mechanics & Raw Material, Plastics & Rubber and Investment & Engineering Services. The award-winners were:
• Electronics: Murata (Capacitors), KOA (Resistors), Rohm (Discretes global category)
• Electromechanics: Panasonic (Motor Systems), Eldor (Mechatronics)
• Mechanics & Raw Material: Schunk (Sintered Parts), Zhenjiang Xianfeng (Stamping)
• Plastic and Rubber: Hutchinson (Rubber), Iriso (Connectors)
• Investment and Engineering: Rehm (Soldering Machines), Bertrandt (Engineering Services)
• Chassis & Safety division-specific solutions: Sakhti (Iron Casting)
• Powertrain division-specific solutions: HVM (Surface Treatment)
• Interior division-specific solutions: Tianma (LCD), Shinko (Decorative Plastics)

In addition to awarding its suppliers of the year, Continental Automotive continued the tradition it started in 2011 of presenting a Quality Award to one company every year in recognition of that company’s exceptional performance in improving quality. The Quality Award for 2016 went to Murata.