In order to see if a vendor will meet our requirements, we actually did significant research on the vendor itself and looked to see if they actually made products to ISO standards, ASTM standards, so on and so forth. We were lucky enough to get in contact from the vendor’s previous customers, and some of our team members were even previous customers from other vendors, so that helped a lot in ensuring that the products we were getting were compliant with our design. Sometimes it is difficult to perform a cost analysis comparing different vendors since some products were the only ones selling the product we required. We have run in to some problems with certain vendors not supplying the product on time and a vendor is the only variable in our project that we know for a fact is out of our control. If a component was delayed, there was nothing we could do but delay our project, but this only happened once. We had the foresight to anticipate this kind of issue and purchased components well ahead of the procurement deadline.