In order to determine this year's award winner, Airbus assessed its suppliers against two criteria – their operational excellence, i.e., logistics, number of returns and quality; and their strategic excellence, or how well their strategy meshes with Airbus' strategy. Esterline Connection Technologies – Souriau's selection as winner is the culmination of more than 15 years of efforts by all its teams and recognises the group's implementation of three strategic areas of development.

The first is its competitiveness. Esterline Connection Technologies – Souriau has had operations in Morocco and India for nearly 20 years and has recently established operations in Mexico. With the acquisition of Sunbank, 37% of its workforce is based in low-cost countries. The second area is the quality of its supply chain. Operating factories in low-cost countries requires having a well-oiled supply chain.

The third area is its continual improvement policy, which was also launched 15 years ago and is driven by Kaizen, Lean and QRQC (Quick Response Quality Control) and the cross-organisational deployment of these approaches throughout the group's operational units. Upon receiving the award from a group of persons consisting of one representative each from Airbus' procurement, quality, supply chain and R&D departments as well as a representative of each harness maker of the sqal group, the Esterline Connection Technologies – Souriau teams were asked to present and explain how they achieved their winning level of excellence.

"We are extremely proud to receive this award for the sixth time," says Jean-Luc Gavelle, President of Esterline Connection Technologies – Souriau. "It is the culmination of the daily commitment of the entire company and of all our teams to total quality and operational excellence and the constant quest on every Souriau site for continuous improvement and innovation." Recently, the company's efforts have also garnered other awards, such as the 2012 Supplier of the Year Award given in June 2013 by Labinal at the Paris Air Show and the Best Supplier Performance – QRQC Award presented by Safran in December 2013. Esterline's recent acquisition of the American company Sunbank will strengthen the group's presence in the USA. Its connection technologies platform, consisting of Souriau and now Sunbank, will allow the group to provide its cutomers with a comprehensive offering of connectors, accessories and conduits.