Suppliers Starting to Charge A Fee for Customer Audits

For maybe the second or third time over the last 2-3 years, when reaching out to suppliers for audit dates I've received some push-back from them saying they've begun charging a fee for customer audits (usually in the $3k-4k range). Their reason is the same: it's expensive for them to host multiple audits throughout the year and they feel they need to recoup the cost from lost production time, resources, etc.

I'm just wondering if anyone else in the medical device industry has run into this and how have you addressed it? Did you pay the fee and move forward with the audit or did you manage it some other way?

Thanks in advance for sharing.

Perhaps this is a hint that more customers should improve the value of their audits?

I've not heard of this in any industry, but I find it interesting. More power to them I guess if they as a supplier can pull it off without losing customers.

As the customer I might say "okay, but only if we can charge you $1000 for each NC we find".

Mike S. said:

I've not heard of this in any industry, but I find it interesting. More power to them I guess if they as a supplier can pull it off without losing customers.

As the customer I might say "okay, but only if we can charge you $1000 for each NC we find".

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I'm curious just how many of their customers pay the fee. Seems to me that if a quality agreement were in place prior to the fee being established, this could present further problems.

I like your take on it from the customer's end!

John Broomfield said:

Perhaps this is a hint that more customers should improve the value of their audits?

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No, it's a hint that many job shops are tired of supplier audits in general. This is not new, but not widespread either. For a busy shop it can easily get out of control, especially when automotive customers are involved.

I thought I remembered a thread from a long time ago from a poster who wanted to start charging for audits because of his location. The poster was near a favored vacation spot so they had a large number of customer audits in a year. I cannot find the post and it was many many years ago that I 'remember' reading it.

Haven't run across this yet but it is an interesting discussion. When I do supplier audits, I do try to minimize the impact. I've been doing "hybrid" audits. I think, in most all cases, a site visit (and walk-through) does need to occur. I guess the number of people to interview is a big disruption driver. I know some companies have policies to audit the supplier (on site) annually. That probably has diminishing returns (unless, as @Michael_M notes, they're at a prime vacation spot!) and maybe impact could be reduced by hybrid or remote.

I do like the response provided by @Mike S.

I found the thread that asks about charging for audits here

I’ve never been a proponent or fan of ‘redoing‘ a certification audit at a certified supplier. They are exactly what “certification to a unified industry standard” were developed to avoid. Seriously, if an organization is certified to ISO-XXXX or whatever, what value is there in a Customer are-auditing them to the same standard? It’s a total waste of tiem for everybody except those trying to pad their frequent flyer miles…

I am a big proponent for auditing for specific technical issues that are of direct effect on the Customer. This doesn’t tie up extraneous resources and it goes directly to what a Customer needs to ensure quality….

Yeah, I never audit the supplier unless I am in the supplier qualification process for a key supplier or there has been a pattern of problems from the supplier. Technical visits engineer-to-engineer are different.