Dave.C
28th March 2006, 11:40 AM
TS16949 requires us to ensure personnel whose work affects quality be informed about the consequences to the customer of shipping parts that are nonconforming to requirements.
Although we have reinforced the issues of complaints, potential loss in business, line stop, recalls or actual failures in the field to our employees, I would like to reinforce this education with real stories of real events and the real consequences.
May I ask Cove members to recount stories of their own personal experiences or incidents they have heard of?
I will start the ball rolling.
We are a Tier 2 supplier manufacturing a safety critical part that ends up on a well known 4x4.
Part of our manufacturing process involves the forming of a connector. Out of the blue our tier 1 customer rings us in a panic saying our parts are "popping off" vehicles as they are driven off the line.
The first thing that happens is our people are rushed to lineside to help sort the problem and avoid a linestop situation. Even our Sales director was sat lineside reworking parts.
Analysis of failed units revealed a dimension out of specification which was causing the part retention failure. Containment of suspect parts is immediate and root cause of the failure is traced to a tooling repair which affected the dimension.
Following the repair the part had been first off checked to all the critical dimensions and significant characteristics, and passed for production. The faulty dim was not one of those checked because our customer also manufacture an identical part themselves and was the design authority for the part. They identified all the critical dimensions and specified SPC on them, but the dimension in question was not covered by any of these checks. Our process FMEA didn't highlight the need for any further checks.
We were able to identify the date of the repair and isolate which batches of parts were affected, but traceability was hindered by our customer not recording any of our batch data supplied prior to using our parts in their assembly. Therefore traceability to which vehicles might be affected became a major cause for concern. Teams were then sent out in the field to dealerships and holding areas to replace parts on many many vehicles. Some valuable but hard lessons were learnt, but had the problem been any greater it would probably have shut us down.
Scary.:mg:
Who's next?
Although we have reinforced the issues of complaints, potential loss in business, line stop, recalls or actual failures in the field to our employees, I would like to reinforce this education with real stories of real events and the real consequences.
May I ask Cove members to recount stories of their own personal experiences or incidents they have heard of?
I will start the ball rolling.
We are a Tier 2 supplier manufacturing a safety critical part that ends up on a well known 4x4.
Part of our manufacturing process involves the forming of a connector. Out of the blue our tier 1 customer rings us in a panic saying our parts are "popping off" vehicles as they are driven off the line.
The first thing that happens is our people are rushed to lineside to help sort the problem and avoid a linestop situation. Even our Sales director was sat lineside reworking parts.
Analysis of failed units revealed a dimension out of specification which was causing the part retention failure. Containment of suspect parts is immediate and root cause of the failure is traced to a tooling repair which affected the dimension.
Following the repair the part had been first off checked to all the critical dimensions and significant characteristics, and passed for production. The faulty dim was not one of those checked because our customer also manufacture an identical part themselves and was the design authority for the part. They identified all the critical dimensions and specified SPC on them, but the dimension in question was not covered by any of these checks. Our process FMEA didn't highlight the need for any further checks.
We were able to identify the date of the repair and isolate which batches of parts were affected, but traceability was hindered by our customer not recording any of our batch data supplied prior to using our parts in their assembly. Therefore traceability to which vehicles might be affected became a major cause for concern. Teams were then sent out in the field to dealerships and holding areas to replace parts on many many vehicles. Some valuable but hard lessons were learnt, but had the problem been any greater it would probably have shut us down.
Scary.:mg:
Who's next?
