My company is a Tier II/Tier III supplier of precision stamped metal parts to the automotive sector.
We were recently visited (read AUDITED) by Ford (3 tiers up from us) and got chewed up REALLY bad....some of which was deserved, some of which I don't think was fair. However, thats a different story.
One of the items that both we AND our customer got beat up on was our PFMEA. Specifically, we were challenged that our SEVERITY scores did not reflect the SEVERITY scores on the DFMEA.
My answer to that was pretty simple; "What DFMEA?????"
I have never in my career been given access to the customer DFMEA (at least, not until about 24 hrs after this observation by the 'visitor').
My question to the rest of the group is; how much information do YOU share with your suppliers? Under what conditions and restrictions?
Is it normal for a supplier to be working 'in the dark' and trying to best-guess the potential effect of a failure of a single sub-component in an assembly that has been vaguely described ('this is a widget...it's used to active the widget-sensor')?
Since then, my customer has committed to sharing DFMEA's on all new programs with us, and so far they seem to be following through. But both their SQA and I are wondering the same thing....are we alone in the madness???
We were recently visited (read AUDITED) by Ford (3 tiers up from us) and got chewed up REALLY bad....some of which was deserved, some of which I don't think was fair. However, thats a different story.
One of the items that both we AND our customer got beat up on was our PFMEA. Specifically, we were challenged that our SEVERITY scores did not reflect the SEVERITY scores on the DFMEA.
My answer to that was pretty simple; "What DFMEA?????"
I have never in my career been given access to the customer DFMEA (at least, not until about 24 hrs after this observation by the 'visitor').
My question to the rest of the group is; how much information do YOU share with your suppliers? Under what conditions and restrictions?
Is it normal for a supplier to be working 'in the dark' and trying to best-guess the potential effect of a failure of a single sub-component in an assembly that has been vaguely described ('this is a widget...it's used to active the widget-sensor')?
Since then, my customer has committed to sharing DFMEA's on all new programs with us, and so far they seem to be following through. But both their SQA and I are wondering the same thing....are we alone in the madness???
