Hi,

I will representing of one of my clients at this summit. Are there other covers who are planning to attend this summit?

More information is here:

http://www.aiag.org/staticcontent/07IMDSELVSummit.pdf

Hi Veggie,:bigwave:

Thanks for the information and how was the IMDS sumit. Is there any changes in the IMDS submission or procedure. Could you please share with us.

Rgd
Guruprasad

Thanks for asking.

It was a very interesting and informative summit. There were about 300 attendees (my rough estimate). There were representatives from the IMDS steering committee (including chairman James Lundstrom) and from Ford, Chrysler, GM and Honda.

- EDS is working on release 6.0 for IMDS with an expected release of June 2008. There are several functional improvements (checking of MDS, version control, showing accept/sent dates for MDS).
- GADSL 2008 will have very few limited changes.
- China might adopt its own version of IMDS (including verification of submitted material data sheet by Chinese laboratories).
- REACH will have a large impact in the coming years.
- GM/Ford and Chrysler will have no or very small changes to the restricted substances standard in 2008 (unless REACH will force them to, not likely tough).

The AIAG plans to publish the presentations on their website in the near future. The presentations of the 2006 summit are still available on their web site.

Now that the IMDS requirements have changed for submissions using standard materials to pick them from the IMDS committee's list rather than creating their own entry, was there any mention at the summit about the Steering Committee planning on getting more of the North American standard materials entered into the system?

I recently spent about 12 hours dealing with the "helpdesk" in regards to a material coating per an ASTM standard that has no reasonable counterpart in a European standard. I put helpdesk above in quotation marks because they were pretty much the most unhelpful bunch of people I've ever dealt with and while I was at home sick (and thus already cranky for having to do work from home instead of getting well in bed) at the time, the magnitude of suckage that was this experience was enough to make me want to choke the life out of the next person who mentioned IMDS to me for the next week or so.

I'll stop there before this goes from a question to a rant about how much IMDS is a complete and utter waste of time (non value added).

Now that the IMDS requirements have changed for submissions using standard materials to pick them from the IMDS committee's list rather than creating their own entry, was there any mention at the summit about the Steering Committee planning on getting more of the North American standard materials entered into the system?

I recently spent about 12 hours dealing with the "helpdesk" in regards to a material coating per an ASTM standard that has no reasonable counterpart in a European standard. I put helpdesk above in quotation marks because they were pretty much the most unhelpful bunch of people I've ever dealt with and while I was at home sick (and thus already cranky for having to do work from home instead of getting well in bed) at the time, the magnitude of suckage that was this experience was enough to make me want to choke the life out of the next person who mentioned IMDS to me for the next week or so.

I'll stop there before this goes from a question to a rant about how much IMDS is a complete and utter waste of time (non value added).

Let me start with that I understand your situation. EDS (in my experience) does not have a helpful support desk for technical problems. (just like Comcast, LOL)

There was some discussion about the IMDS steering committee standards (like what you are trying to do), but no discussion on bringing more US standards into the IMDS system.

I have a suggestion for you. Goto to the AIAG website and look events. The AIAG has published the presentation of the last summit. The presentation contain email addresses and phone numbers of IMDS steering committtee and AIAG IMDS group. For example both Doris Hill (GM) and Dave Mattis (GM) have been very helpful in the past when I had questions. You can also try your Tier1 customer steering commiitte contact

If you can not get your question answered through them, let me know by a private email and we will dug further.

Now that the IMDS requirements have changed for submissions using standard materials to pick them from the IMDS committee's list rather than creating their own entry, was there any mention at the summit about the Steering Committee planning on getting more of the North American standard materials entered into the system?

Just because standard IMDS-committee materials are encouraged does not make them mandatory. You can still create your material or get your supplier to prepare a submission (if applicable). If your materials are metals, there are sites that help identify equivalent standards across jurisdictions.

More IMDS-committee materials have been added this past year. I've found various coatings and Asian-spec metals now available. Wherever possible, I have phased out the in-house material MDS that we were using, but that isn't always possible.

A more key requirement is supplier development. If your supplier is not making the material to the spec, then using a standard material is actually incorrect and possibly fraudulent.

B.G. Wiehle

Just because standard IMDS-committee materials are encouraged does not make them mandatory.

I agree with you, but unfortunately my customer does not. This is a quick rundown of how my experience went (the short short version).

Customer: I want IMDS for part x.
Me: Done.
Customer: Rejected. You didn't use the standard materials per IMDS. See page 3 on this document.
Me: Ok. But steel x per ASTM x and coating y per ASTM y doesn't exist.
Customer: Contact helpdesk, not my problem.
Me: Ok.
Helpdesk: Find the European equivalent.
Me: Doesn't exist. You need to add this material, here is all the work that I've done for you.
Helpdesk: We don't do research.
Me: *headdesk* I already did the research for you.
Helpdesk: We don't actually provide help, sorry.
Me: I'm using my own entry because it doesn't exist.
Customer: No, use this item number instead.
Me: No, it isn't the same thing.
Customer: But that's what we use here.
Me: *headdesk* It isn't what your north american operations are using, knucklehead. Take my submission or YOU deal with helpdesk.
Customer: Fine, we'll accept it but we don't like it and will complain about this for every future submission until YOU get it fixed.
Me: *headdesk*

Other customers have no problem with me just creating my own entries for the base materials, publishing them internally, and then using those to create their submissions. Those would be my customers whose home offices are in Michigan, not the ones with corporate HQ in Germany. So I am aware that it isn't just the unhelpfullness of IMDS helpdesk causing me problems, but also the unhelpfulness of my customer as well.

I agree with you, but unfortunately my customer does not. This is a quick rundown of how my experience went (the short short version)...
Me: *headdesk*... Me: *headdesk*... Me: *headdesk*...

Wow...
I haven't experienced anything like that. My worst IMDS recipients have demanded that missing submissions be sent, without looking for them first (other Tier 1's who should know better). Even they are reasonable about it.

If you don't mind, what are the specs in question (customer's requirement, actual material and print callout)? You indicated that this customer has both European and North American operations - if their head office is in USA, maybe there is recourse there. (I don't think it's us :mg:)

B.G. Wiehle

Wow...
If you don't mind, what are the specs in question (customer's requirement, actual material and print callout)? You indicated that this customer has both European and North American operations - if their head office is in USA, maybe there is recourse there. (I don't think it's us :mg:)

The callout on the quote/drawing/etc. is for a Galvanized G01 coating per ASTM A653. The steel itself we found a reasonable match in an existing entry from the IMDS steering committee entries, but at the time this all went down (late April 2007) I went through every entry from IMDS that contained the letter "z" (it took some time) and there was nothing in a zinc coating that matched up to the ASTM callout. I ended up creating my own entry which I published (look for IMDS entry 20770377 version 2).

The requirement of a G01 coating is at least 99% zinc, 0.05 - 0.25% aluminum, and the remainder as trace/non-reportable (wildcard - misc.). Every entry I found didn't have an acceptable range of aluminum (all too high).

The problem we've got is that we ship product to three manufacturing facilities for this customer in North America, and they have a corporate office in a fourth location. However, all the IMDS entries are being reviewed and approved by someone at their global HQ in Germany.

Of course, the guy has also rejected entries for the drawing number being incorrect because there are spaces in between the numbers (example 1 234 56 instead of 123456) when on the drawing there are clearly spaces in between the numbers.

This is probably as much a difficult customer issue as it is an unhelpfuldesk issue, but combining the two together equals *headdesk*

Hello All,

If I understand the problem exactly. You are all referring to the Revised IMDS Recommendations 001, according to which you need to enter the standard material number for material under the classifications 1-4.

As per my knowledge this number acts as a standard (Material designation) which refers to the same compositions and material world wide .i.e. like standard units we refer to.

One more thing I need to inform you all is that they are not encouraging to use the Material modules from IMDS committee rather than they are insisting us to us as reference for construction of our material modules.

Regards
Guruprasad