Jessterish
Starting to get Involved
I'm still fairly new to the world of quality, but came across something the other day that I am slightly confused on, hopefully some of you nice people can help me out.
We have a number of colors of products (baked enamel on steel) that we produce. Our standard is LAB +/- 0.5 from standards. So far, apparently so good. However, our standards are coupons, that are then referenced back to another standard at the manufacturers and have deviations written on the back, which are apparently based off another "Master-Master." That is in turn not defined from another absolute value of some sort, but sent to purchasing on some basis that no one in my department is apparently actually able to tell me, and they approve (or reapprove) based on customer requirements and visual only comparisons. In fact our stock material has no individual final customer, so it's just approved by purchasing with no outside influence that anyone can tell me about.
This seems crazy to me? In doing comparisons, I can reliably pick out deviations of .7 between products (which would be in spec), and because we dispose of our out of date paint samples, we have no idea about drift across years. I mention because we have repairable products still in circulation after 10+ years. I haven't heard of a lot of issues with customers ordering things and complaining about it, but It certainly seems like it's just waiting to happen.
Am I being paranoid? I keep looking for answers, but the further I go with this, the more it looks like no one else cares about it at all.
We have a number of colors of products (baked enamel on steel) that we produce. Our standard is LAB +/- 0.5 from standards. So far, apparently so good. However, our standards are coupons, that are then referenced back to another standard at the manufacturers and have deviations written on the back, which are apparently based off another "Master-Master." That is in turn not defined from another absolute value of some sort, but sent to purchasing on some basis that no one in my department is apparently actually able to tell me, and they approve (or reapprove) based on customer requirements and visual only comparisons. In fact our stock material has no individual final customer, so it's just approved by purchasing with no outside influence that anyone can tell me about.
This seems crazy to me? In doing comparisons, I can reliably pick out deviations of .7 between products (which would be in spec), and because we dispose of our out of date paint samples, we have no idea about drift across years. I mention because we have repairable products still in circulation after 10+ years. I haven't heard of a lot of issues with customers ordering things and complaining about it, but It certainly seems like it's just waiting to happen.
Am I being paranoid? I keep looking for answers, but the further I go with this, the more it looks like no one else cares about it at all.