Please comment on this excuse from a suppleir:
" Sending defective units to catch up the shippinng schedule"

I've seen things like that, as a customer, where we know that there are issues at the supplier but we need inventory. We would do a sort/evaluation on the product and figure out what we could use to keep production going.

Please comment on this excuse from a suppleir:
" Sending defective units to catch up the shippinng schedule"

As shocking :mg:as it may seem, this happens frequently in the manufacturing sector. When shipping or production demands are high, quality often suffers, which in turn results in unhappy customers....Not a justification by any means, but this happens and is a constant source of frustration for many quality managers....:2cents:

Sending defective units to catch up the shipping schedule"Am I reading that right? Defective units?

Please comment on this excuse from a suppleir:
" Sending defective units to catch up the shippinng schedule"

Hello qbwu1,

Looks shocking to many, but you what? At least they are honest. There are some suppliers that ship you cr@p knowingly, and let you come to that conclusion.

Bad either way. :( :(

Stijloor.

Yes, defective unit. A defect (nonconformant part in unit) that can be replaced later by shipping the conformant part.

Did they perhaps make arrangements with the buyer in advance to ship the defective unit so that their on-time delivery rating (or whatever you might have) wasn't affected?

Here is a direct quote from one of our suppliers....
"Now I'd rather take a chance and potentially ship incorrectly than hold a shipment to the following day for checking but have production stopped." This was after many issues of Part A being ordered and Part B being shipped. Everything was shipped on-time however 1/100 parts were the wrong part. Now this would hold up production even longer than shipping the right part 1 day late as the wrong part needs to be quarantined, shipped back to the supplier and then we have to wait for the correct part to come in. (considering we are logistically challenged here in BC, this could sometimes take 2 weeks)
After a few emails, conference calls, and one on-site visit, we have finally solved the solution. We agreed to push our ordering date back one day to give them that extra time to do a pre-shipping quality check...
Unless we had agreed to accept shipments that were potentially incorrect/nonconforming, and proceed with internal inspection/sorting I would inform the supplier to not send the shipment until it was verified that 100% was conforming prior to it being received on our docks....:2cents:

Please comment on this excuse from a suppleir:
" Sending defective units to catch up the shippinng schedule"

Was the entire consignment defective or few parts within the consignment defective ?

As a former receiving inspector for an automotive supplier of underbody fluid-carry tubing assemblies, I had a regular shipment of components that continually had to be 100% gaged for bad threads. Sort out the bad ones and ship them back to the supplier. Just for fun one day, I marked the inside of the defective nuts with black marker before shipping them back. At first they came back scattered within other boxes, but eventually they just shipped us back the defective boxes whole.

The degree of acceptable deviation from standard seems to be proportional to the proximity of the shipping date. *sigh*

Jilliebob

One company I worked with had a good method for dealing with this. A shipment wasn't received until GOOD parts were received. If it took 2 weeks to replace the defects, the shipment was 2 weeks late. We didn't start our accounts payable cycle until then. This was all spelled out in the PO.

Geoff Withnell

FWIW:
As a supplier, I would have fallen on my sword before that message would have been allowed out to a customer.

I suspect it was not a unilateral statement and there was conversation BEFORE and AFTER such message, especially that both buyer and supplier agreed sorting and/or repair could be done by buyer with some price adjustment charged to seller.

In ten years, we shipped late less than a dozen times, BUT we always had on-going dialog with the customers on shipping advice. If it was a matter of days, we paid for difference in express shipping to make original delivery date. If the delay was longer, we negotiated some compromise. The nature of our products was they were not repairable by a customer for physical defects, but "might" be accepted by customer for cosmetic defects that did not affect form, fit, function of the product. The truth is not ALL nonconformances are material to the form, fit, or function of a product and customers with full knowledge of the facts are often willing to compromise after an analysis of the situation - either for price or time of delivery.

Echoing Geoff's commentOne company I worked with had a good method for dealing with this. A shipment wasn't received until GOOD parts were received. If it took 2 weeks to replace the defects, the shipment was 2 weeks late. We didn't start our accounts payable cycle until then. This was all spelled out in the PO.

Geoff Withnellalmost every industrial buyer has a similar clause that delivery must be within a specified window of time (NOT TOO EARLY, NOT TOO LATE) and accepted by receiving inspection as conforming goods before delivery is acknowledged. In my experience, I always added my own clause which said delaying receiving inspection for ANY reason could not defer the time table for payment. In the case of one FUBAR customer, I forced them to make payment on the 30th day after delivery to their dock or pay 10% late fee. Of course, we also had clauses which allowed them to recover if subsequent inspection showed a VALID nonconformance. I collected 3 penalty payments before they got smart enough to pay me on time even if they hadn't gotten around to inspecting the shipment by the 30th day because in over five years we had zero n/c for product quality or delivery time.