The province of Örebro approximately 260 000 inhabitants and 280 manufacturing companies with more than 10 employees. Eleven of these companies are suppliers to the building industry. A survey concerning key business processes in these 280 companies was carried out in the beginning of 2002. The purpose of the survey was to analyse key processes such as customer focus, information & benchmarking, quality & supplier focus and innovation processes. One basic finding is that the manufacturing companies score top levels in “Leader­ship and planning” but low in ”Information & Benchmarking”. Another finding is that “Innovation” also scores low. This combination of low information and low innovation might have negative effects on the Swedish construction contractors because of their dependence on active suppliers. In this paper we compare those companies which are suppliers to the building companies with the total group of companies in the survey. One result from this study is that the building material suppliers as a group score poorer than other lines of business on innovation