Are line accumulations acceptable in today's market? We are automotive coaters (liquid and powder) and our customer releases a corrective action for every flawed part. As we ship 100,000 parts per week to this customer, we feel that one part that has a defect, either die casting or coating, could be accumulated and returned monthly. Instead we have to formally answer each defect. Our PPMs are extremely low. Getting 10-15 of these corrective actions is painfully expensive in time and effort to answer. This is strictly a cosmetic concern. Seems to us that 12 cosmetically defective parts out of half a million a month could be written off to the fact that 100% inspection is never going to be 100% effective. Anyone else having problems with customers with unreachable expectations?

Unfortunately this is more typical than you'd think. Customers think of each failure as a special cause, rather than looking for systemic issues. It ends up costing both parties a lot of time filling out paperwork (even if it's computerized) that could be better spent looking for trends, etc.

Welcome to The Cove! :bigwave:

If your customer asks for individual responses to individual CAs, I doubt you can decide to cluster them at your own discretion.

While it's true that 100% inspection is far from effective, I noted these are cosmetic defects and automotive (including TS16949 standard) includes cosmetic flaws as part defects. So, I have questions:

1. What are the defects' nature? That is, why is it important?
2. What is being done to understand how often the various types of defects occur, when and why?
3. What is happening to eliminate causes of errors for #2?

Welcome to The Cove! :bigwave:

If your customer asks for individual responses to individual CAs, I doubt you can decide to cluster them at your own discretion.

While it's true that 100% inspection is far from effective, I noted these are cosmetic defects and automotive (including TS16949 standard) includes cosmetic flaws as part defects. So, I have questions:

1. What are the defects' nature? That is, why is it important?
2. What is being done to understand how often the various types of defects occur, when and why?
3. What is happening to eliminate causes of errors for #2?

I would be willing to bet that based on the volume, the cost of CA paperwork processing and handling of defective parts exceeds the value of the parts.

The defect may be cosmetic, but the customer is expecting a surface critical finish. The thing here is, if all are the same "cause" cut and paste. If you know what the problem is and it is part of normal variation and not worth doing anything about, why spend a lot of time on it? use the stock answer and give them their money back for the defective parts.

BTW, do they request a formal corrective action on each, or are they just sending them to you as a request for credit? Many people confuse a notification of a problem with a request for corrective action. Or, another thing you may want to do is get together with your customer and work out some mutually agreed upon solution.