Thank you. It's automotive, and heavy machinery. Currently I am the only one capable of programming, and having time to do it is limited. Every time I mention making corrections, I'm immediately stopped by the quality manager. She believes continuing to do it wrong and not tell anyone is better than correcting the problem. Just two weeks ago one of the customers, through a series of events, found out the print was being violated through improper alignments. They were obviously angry. I had explained to our QA manager, the director of sales, and the GM for weeks prior, why that was a bad idea, and that we should fix the issues before running again. They insisted, "we PPAP'ed them like this and they accepted them so we're doing it like this again". I "believe" the customer simply approved the PPAP by reading it, and then let the parts sit on a shelf until a time they were needed (6 months or so). I pleaded for our company to come clean. It would look good that we were honest, and that at worst, we'd have to redo a 30 piece PPAP. I said we could attribute the problems to individuals who didn't work there anymore (entirely true). However, the new order was for 900pcs. I impressed upon them to examine which was the most efficient path to take. They chose to keep things hushed, and they got caught. Of course that created hours and hours of fruitless inspection by me, producing results to try and explain what I had been telling them for weeks. The program was wrong!
One of the problems with this company is that literally no one above me understands programming, or GD&T, and only one of them understands prints. The GM started on the same day I did three months ago, and this is his first position in a precision machine shop. He had one year experience in a foundry after college. Smart guy, but young and inexperienced. I have been programming for 20 years. He's not making all these decisions on his own. He's relying on advice of people who should know better. The other two people responsible for knowingly allowing this to continue, before he or I started working here. The QA manager, and the director of sales.
I am not suggesting these people are dumb, and that I'm of superior intellect, or a know it all. I make mistakes myself, for sure, but there are simply things that have obviously been done incorrectly by well intended, yet inexperienced persons before me that need to be corrected. I'm of the mindset that I don't pay the bills. If management wants to make decisions which they feel is in their best interest, then so be it. However, I think it's absolutely imperative that we first ensure we're doing everything correctly before those decisions are made. I have run into situations where an engineer had obviously draw something incorrectly, yet insists it must be done that way. Perhaps it's an alignment construction that's impossible to create. I see that on a regular basis. I can understand a company making the decision to do it correctly, and moving forward with that. I don't understand knowingly violating a correctly drawn print.
