Choosing a Reliable Aerospace Metal Fabrication Partner: Proven Procurement Strategies

Finding the right aerospace fabrication partner can be tricky due to a wide variety of factors. Often,  service partners are selected based solely on their ability to provide a low cost solution. While cost remains a critical factor in any decision, it’s important to consider the company’s overall capabilities, experience, and quality. This blog post aims to help procurement professionals develop useful questions to ask potential partners.

A Brief Overview

Some companies focus on offering larger production runs at a lower cost, while others concentrate their efforts on low volume projects with greater customization capabilities. If you’re a procurement professional looking for a suitable company to work with, it’s important that you begin to gauge the services that prospective companies will offer.

Tips to Find an Aerospace Metal Fabrication Partner

As you can imagine, success in any fabrication project is entirely dependent on absolute accuracy; finding a company with skilled workers who can perform precision applications for your parts and comments is crucial to ensure high quality products. Consider the following questions when you are seeking a partner. 


Does the company have on-site testing capabilities? Detailed inspections are necessary to guarantee the accuracy of fabrication procedures. Look for a company that can conduct these tests on-site and offer quick feedback on the precision achieved for your components— this is helpful for evaluating the quality of their services.

Can the fabricator build a product from start to finish? There are some instances when you may have multiple partners for a given aerospace project. Yet, the option to consolidate several steps at once is ideal for improving delivery, cost, and overall logistical convenience. Building out a product from start to finish could entail building out a product from raw materials to final assembly. How many steps are you willing to save, and with what partners, comes down to deeply understanding what each fabricator is cable of executing and what efficiencies they have. Strong, multi-service vendors will have obvious signs of logistical efficiency within their facility.

You may wonder how to determine efficiency? This is best carried out through a short visit of their facility.  Create a mental checklist of a few observations to make:

• Does it appear like the fabricator has a logical and optimized project management system in place?
• Does their facility appear to be well-organized and clean?
• How well does the fabricator plan out work capacity?
• Is there solid communication between service departments?

What’s their consultation and engineering experience?A great fabricator should ideally also be a strategic partner who can help optimize the manufacturing process for your projects. They should have the ability to make valuable suggestions to improve the design of your part to more effectively work with your final product.

Regardless, you should be in good hands if the prospective partner shows signs of moving away from “cookie cutter” methodologies. Often, clients request manufacturing processes to be continually optimized so the production of a particular part becomes more efficient over time— any fabricator willing to go through the necessary steps to do so, provided they have the proper personnel to achieve those goals, is deserving of your consideration.