Absolutely. Very foolish. We can't do it right, but we have the (time, money, resources...) to do it over! :confused:

When the third party sorting companies began buying buildings in Detroit, I knew it was going to get ugly in Automotive.

I've always thought it would be very interesting to know how much of that third-party sorting was unnecessary--e.g., due to bad specifications, rather than bad parts. A lot, I suspect.

NOTE: Copied from Is zero defects possible? We are dealing with 25 to 30 parameters (http://elsmar.com/Forums/showthread.php?t=21166) by Marc.

OK, I'll go first. This incident doesn't involve third-party sorting per se, but close enough...

In a bygone time I worked for an injection molding shop that, among other types of products, made speaker grilles for the home entertainment industry. One such company was a very large and well-regarded company and the product in question was a grille (fabric stretched over a plastic frame) used on a center-channel speaker.

One day the customer complained that the cloth was separating from the frame on some parts, and demanded that my company dispatch people to do some sorting. I was chosen (lucky me) to get in the car with a couple of hourly workers and drive some 3-4 hours to the customer's plant. After looking at a few thousand parts we found no bad ones, and in fact there was no evidence of any bad parts anywhere in the plant. When I asked for the source of the complaint, I was told that retailers had returned some grilles that had the problem, but no one knew where they were. In the meantime, back at home, people were looking at the process, WIP and stores and also found no evidence of anything wrong.

Fast forward a few weeks. I'm in a Best Buy store waiting for CD player to be installed in my car, so I wander over to the audio department and there on a shelf is the speaker in question, and the cloth on it was indeed pulled away from the frame. It took me about two seconds to see what was going on. The grille on this particular speaker was not removable. When people are looking at speakers in stores, they are likely to try to remove the grilles to get a look at the drivers underneath. This particular speaker appeared to have been on the shelf for a long time, and apparently a lot of people had been pulling on the grille, trying in vain to remove it, and after a while the cloth started coming loose.

There was nothing wrong with the parts, or the process, or the design, for that matter. The problem was retail stores returning old shelf stock for credit, and using the pulled-away grille cloth as a convenient excuse. As far as I was able to tell, there were only two such returns, both from the same store. Our customer, rather than doing something radical like thinking, knee-jerked and pointed the gun at an innocent supplier.

I was lucky enough to have heard such war stories more than 40 years ago as I entered business.

My result from FMEA (Failure Mode & Evaluation Analysis) was to "inoculate" customers at "Contract Review" time about the process for CONFIRMING suspected nonconformance BEFORE we would accept returns or arrange or pay for sorting by anyone (us, customer, or third party.)

Many folks are surprised to hear I NEVER had a customer balk or give me such guff as "WE decide what is a nonconformance." The secret to that was our policy that when a "prospect" balked, he never became a "customer." Why take on a jerk for a customer?