Customer Quality Manual Requirements

[Kurt Smith]

Do you know if your parts will be considered as production parts by your customer? Most IATF companies will have special allowances for small volume orders that won't be part of a full production run.

Our company is in a similar spot. We do aftermarket and emergency runs for the trucking industry, but we are only ISO 9001. Our main customer has a limit of how many parts they can order from us before they need to switch to a IATF manufacturer. So for most of our parts we arn't held to the higher standard. Occasionally they let us work through a third party or some other special circumstance that lets us do production runs. The PPAP requirements are enough to keep me busy for days, and I still have some gaps they are just kindly ignoring.

 

[Ron Rompen]

Hi all,

Thanks for all your input, I appreciate it.

Some valid comments from all of you.
I think communicating back to them on anything unachievable is a good step in the right direction.

@Golfman25 --Yes PPAP is a nasty one.
Generally I like to bounce back any historic requirement for PPAP to the customer and establish the reasoning.
ie: what level as per PSW- change of design, change of supplier, the list goes on.

Thanks again All.

Just a word of caution/guidance regarding annual PPAP submissions.

Please be sure you understand the ACTUAL requirement (per the AIAG PPAP manual) before focusing on the 'level' of PPAP that you are required to submit.

The only REAL difference between a Lvl 4 and a Lvl 3 is what you are required to SUBMIT to the customer - the remainder of the requirements (part layout, capability studies, etc) are all still there, the only difference is you RETAIN them, rather than submit them.

We got caught on this one many many years ago, and it was a real eye-opener.