Supply Chain Excellence

Continuous supply and consistent quality are the foundations that form our partnership with our customers. Providing Customer-Focused Supply Excellence is at the center of what we do.

Close Collaboration with Integrated Supply Chain Operations

Our Quality and Regulatory team works hand-in-hand with our Integrated Supply Chain Operations team to establish:

• Technology-focused manufacturing teams, assuring the best process capabilities to deliver quality products on time to our customers
• A large and strategic network of global distribution centers assuring the right product is in the right place, at the right time, to meet our customers’ needs
• Sophisticated and customer-aligned supply chain capabilities to assure fulfillment of customer needs at the highest level, across more than 300,000 products

We ensure quality by:

• Launching new innovative products into existing plants and adhering to our strict quality policies and practices
• Supporting the continuous improvement of products through a Quality Customer Care process and dedicated Quality Services
• Providing a partnership to support older product claims, capability and other needed improvements
• Helping to drive and support a quality-driven culture
• Driving and supporting manufacturing changes that impact product performance, claims, raw materials, plant transfers, suppliers and more

We ensure supply through:

• Long-range planning to support decision making for capacity and other needed investments
• Short-term planning support to prevent back orders
• Being a partner and promoter of business continuity planning and supply security
• Understanding Life Cycle Management to help margin, growth opportunity and costs
• Providing manufacturing locations for our products that span across the entire Integrated Supply Chain Operations Network

Supplier Quality Management

The Supplier Quality Management program is designed to manage effective control over the quality of all procured products, processes and services that directly or indirectly support material provided to our customers.

The Supplier Quality Management group provides oversight of the program by:

• Maintaining and ensuring the Supplier Quality Management procedure complies to our corporate group quality standard for Supplier Quality Management.
• Training, assessing, monitoring and assisting Life Science sites in the implementation of all aspects of the Supplier Quality Management program as outlined in the procedure.
• Maintaining the Supplier Quality Management program in response to industry and regulatory trends, customer requirements and business needs.

Supplier Assessments & Audits

All Life Science sites perform an annual categorization of suppliers and create an audit/assessment schedule.

Assessments are accomplished through supplier self-survey questionnaires, on-site audits, or a combination of both. Questionnaires have related scoring sheets.

Learn more about Supply Chain Risk Mitigation.