How to buy supply chain and logistics services
A logistics provider moves and holds your parts. It does not make them approved, and the obligations that follow a part around still belong to you.
This category covers inventory management, warehousing, kitting to the line, aircraft on ground movements and international freight for aerospace and defense parts. The company that sells you the part is a distributor and has its own guide. The company that repairs it is a repair station. A logistics provider is neither, and the most common failure in this category is a buyer who assumes otherwise.
What the provider changes, and what it cannot
Approval status travels with the part and its paperwork. The regulation on replacement and modification articles lists the routes by which an article may lawfully be produced for installation on a type certificated product, and a warehouse in the middle of the chain is not one of them.1 Moving a part does not make it installable, and neither does storing it well. What a logistics provider can do is preserve or destroy the evidence: the release documentation, the lot and batch identity, the shelf life, the storage condition and the chain of custody. Buy it on that basis.
Custody controls are the specification
Ask which quality system the provider works to, and check it against what the FAA accepts for distribution: ASA-100, ISO 9001 through certification bodies accredited by International Accreditation Forum signatories, and the AS9100, AS9110 and AS9120 family, each with its named accreditation route.2 Ask how goods receipt matches documents to parts, and what happens when they do not match. Ask about shelf life control, temperature and humidity monitoring, electrostatic-sensitive handling, and segregation of quarantined stock. Ask who owns the inventory at each point, when title transfers, and who bears loss. Ask what the provider will do if the FAA publishes an unapproved parts notification that touches something in your bin, because the programme investigates every report it receives and publishes those notifications.3
The cross-border half
An international logistics provider is acting inside your export obligations, not its own. The Bureau of Industry and Security publishes the Export Administration Regulations, classification guidance, country guidance and the Consolidated Screening List, which is the check that has to happen before a shipment, not after it.4 Ask who performs classification and screening on your consignments, ask to see the record of a screen, and ask what the provider does when a match appears. Ask how licences, end use statements and denied party checks are documented, and where those records live when an auditor asks in three years. For federal work, note that supply chain security orders are published alongside entity registration in the government's own system, and a provider doing federal business is registered there and checkable.5
Service levels have to be measurable
Ask for measured performance rather than promises: on-time delivery by lane, receipt to putaway time, pick accuracy, inventory record accuracy and the aircraft on ground response time as a distribution, not an average. Ask what the escalation path is at three in the morning, and who has authority to charter. Ask how the provider's system talks to yours and what the integration costs. Ask what happens at the end of the contract: how stock is returned, in what condition, with which records, and at whose cost.
Questions that sort providers
Ask which accreditation the site holds and when it expires. Ask for a walk-through of the receiving and quarantine areas. Ask for the screening and classification procedure in writing. Ask for two customers of similar size, and ask them what happened the last time something went missing.
The companies below are listed on public facts, each with its source linked.
Sources, in the order cited
- 1Electronic Code of Federal Regulations · 14 CFR 21.9, Replacement and modification articles
- 2Federal Aviation Administration · Voluntary Industry Distributor Accreditation Program, with the accepted quality system standards
- 3Federal Aviation Administration · The Suspected Unapproved Parts programme and the unapproved parts notifications
- 4US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security · The Export Administration Regulations, classification and the Consolidated Screening List
- 5United States General Services Administration · SAM.gov, federal entity registration and supply chain security orders