5 Ways to Collaborate with Your Aerospace Supplier During Design and Development
Collaboration among team, suppliers, and partners is the only way to ensure high-quality, precision, flight-ready parts and assemblies. The most successful programs aren’t executed as transactions, but as partnerships, where communication happens early and often throughout the product lifecycle.
OEM engineers and buyers need a strong aerospace supplier relationship to instill confidence that their program’s complexity and timeline will be achieved. However, this strong relationship is built on both ends.
Here are 5 tips for working with your aerospace supplier during design and development to ensure precision, performance, and long-term value.
1. Engage Your Supplier Early
One of the most common pitfalls in aerospace programs is waiting too long to involve manufacturing partners. If designs are already finalized when you bring in your manufacturing partner, you lose opportunities to optimize for performance and production, which can lead to manufacturability issues that would otherwise have been avoided.
Downstream changes are costly and cause delays that can derail entire programs. When engaged early, suppliers are able to:
- Identify design features that may drive unnecessary cost or complexity
- Recommend alternative materials or processes that meet performance requirements
- Flag tolerancing, fixturing, or inspection challenges before they impact schedules
Tap into real-world manufacturing expertise by involving your supplier during concept or preliminary design phases, and strengthen designs before they reach production.
2. Design for Manufacturability and Scalability
Collaborating with your supplier helps ensure that your design that performed well in CAD will also be manufacturable, repeatable, and scalable.
Here are a few key topics to review with your supplier:
- Are tolerances achievable and necessary for function?
- Does the selected material support machining efficiency and performance?
- Do the part geometry and features contribute to streamlined production, or do they require extra setups and tooling?
You want your supplier to help balance design intent with practical manufacturing realities while maintaining high quality and compliance.
3. Be Proactive Vs. Reactive
Open and structured communication prevents misalignment between engineering, procurement, and manufacturing teams that could otherwise lead to delays, rework, or unexpected costs.
It’s best to identify a single point of contact on both sides who can coordinate and oversee regular design and production review meetings. New requirements, scheduling changes, or identified risk factors should be shared during regular updates as they can drastically impact program timing and the final product.
4. Align on Quality Expectations
Quality requirements are not open to interpretation. Everyone should be working toward the same standards and be fully aligned on requirements from day one.
All parties should be in agreement on:
- Inspection and validation methods
- Documentation requirements (FAI, PPAP, AS9100 processes, etc.)
- Risk management and corrective action protocols
An experienced aerospace supplier will not only meet quality requirements but help OEMs navigate them, instilling confidence that parts will perform as intended in mission-critical applications.
5. Lean on Your Supplier for Process Expertise
Beyond machining capacity and technical expertise, advanced aerospace manufacturing suppliers offer exceptional skills in precision processes, inspection technologies, and quality control / continuous improvement processes.
Your supplier can lend expertise in areas including process selection and optimization, production workflow planning, and fixture and tooling design. Harnessing your supplier’s prowess in these key areas often can improve lead times, control costs, and accelerate scaling from low-volume production to a more sustained program.
Build a Long-Term Partnership, Not a One-Off Transaction
Trust and transparency are often seen as buzzwords that don’t truly differentiate a supplier because these qualities are expected.
While true, there is still great value in trust and transparency, and these traits are not present in every supplier relationship. OEMs should feel confident their supplier understands their program goals, production volume needs, performance expectations, and industry evolutions.
Such long-term alignment allows suppliers to invest in the right people, processes, and equipment to support these relationships and ensure quick problem resolution, cost and efficiency gains, and greater resilience when program demands shift.
OEM engineers and buyers ultimately benefit with reduced risk and greater program stability.
At Primus, collaboration is built into every stage of the manufacturing process. We partner closely with our customers from design through delivery to ensure every precision-manufactured component is ready for mission-critical performance.
