lday38 said:
yes, I agree. Responding in a timely manner in both a corrective and preventive way is the best approach. I am speaking about measuring our performance. However, there is no doubt that the cultue has to be there for an effectve corrective action process. At least two of our major problems are going to take a long term development plan, meanwhile we are absorbing sort costs. Sorting 100% is not as effective to prevent these bad parts from reaching the cusomter as I would like
I'm painfully aware of the costs of sorting.
One of my suppliers had a major "disconnect" in a process and ended up with 100,000 suspect pieces. They were sure the only way to sort to eliminate most of the nonconforming parts would have been to build a special gage to mimic the mating part, then run each and every piece through the gage. Alternate methods they thought of were even more costly and labor-intensive.
I became aware of the situation when the supplier missed a partial delivery of 5,000 pieces. The fluster and bluster of conflicting excuses from two different folks at the supplier induced me to have one of our engineers who lived near the supplier take a short detour to check out the situation first-hand.
When my engineer phoned from the supplier's shop, he was laughing so hard, I could barely understand him.
He said,
"You won't believe what these guys are doing! They screwed up 100,000 parts that they make for a dollar each and sell to us for a dollar fifty. Now, they are planning to spend $3,000 to build a gage so they can sort the parts at a rate of one per minute. They were too embarrassed to ask us for mating parts to use for gages. They know why their machine screwed up and can knock out 5,000 good parts today, but they didn't want to spend $1,000 for bar stock to make the parts! Should I explain the economics to them?"
I said, "Put the plant manager on the phone. I'll talk to him."
We got our 5,000 good pieces that day. We sent over 25 mating parts to use as sorting gages
($5 each mating part and the net time to check each piece was only 20 seconds) and the supplier learned one lesson he'll never forget -
When in doubt, tell the truth! We also helped our supplier learn about SPC and in-process inspection for future work. All in all, our supplier increased his profits as a result of the SNAFU. He learned to look outside his firm for answers to avoid
"can't see forest for the trees" syndrome and he learned the value of maintaining customer dialog.
Bottom line:
Supplier-customer partnerships really can work, but only if both parties contribute to the effort. Chief goal - eliminate fictions like ZERO DEFECTS.
One other thing: I LOVE the way most engineers think - they usually look for an "elegant" solution (one that is simple and inexpensive) because they believe in Occam's Razor. Our engineer was a great example.
OCCAM'S RAZOR
named after William of Occam. Given a choice between two explanations, choose the simplest -- the explanation which requires the fewest assumptions.