Boeing names 14 companies as its Suppliers of the Year

The Boeing Company on April 13 honored 14 companies as winners of its 2009 Supplier of the Year award.

The winners, chosen from among the company's more than 12,000 active suppliers worldwide, are located in Germany, India, Japan and the United States. They were judged on quality, delivery performance, cost, environmental initiatives, customer service and technical expertise. Four are small businesses as defined by the U.S. government.

The winners, and the categories, are:

• AZX International Corporation (Huntington Beach, Calif.) – Aerospace support
• Bridgestone Corporation (Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan) – Electro, hydraulic and mechanical standards
• Cytec Engineered Materials Inc. (Greenville, Texas) – Common aerospace commodities
• Deharde-Maschinenbau H. Hoffmann GmbH (Varel, Germany) – International
• Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (Daytona Beach, Fla.) – Academia
• Frontier Electronics Systems Corporation (Stillwater, Okla.) – Avionics
• GE Commercial Engine Operations (Evendale, Ohio) – Propulsion
• GM Nameplate Inc. (Seattle) – Interiors
• Hamilton Sundstrand, Electric Systems - 787 Team (Rockford, Ill.) – The Pathfinder Award, a new award recognizing outstanding efforts and significant strides in performance
• Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (Bangalore, India) – The Alliance Award, a new award recognizing unique capabilities and services that are instrumental to a new Boeing product
• OfficeMax Inc. (Naperville, Ill.) – Non-production
• San Antonio Lighthouse for the Blind (San Antonio) – Diversity
• The Toolroom Inc. (Owensville, Mo.) – Outside manufacturing
• Honeywell's UOP (Des Plaines, Ill.) – Technology

"Boeing and our suppliers are more interconnected now than ever before - combining our talents and capabilities to create the most innovative products and services for our customers and the aerospace industry worldwide," said Ray Conner, Boeing enterprise leader of supplier management and vice president and general manager of supply chain management and operations for Boeing Commercial Airplanes. "Every supplier – small and large – is critical to our success, and it is important to recognize these suppliers for demonstrating industry-leading standards of quality, efficiency and performance."

Before being chosen a Supplier of the Year, each company was named as one of the 486 recipients of a Boeing Performance Excellence Award. For information on the 2009 awards, visit the Boeing Supplier Performance Awards Web site.