Yesterday we had a meeting with one of our bar stock suppliers.
This supplier is a distributor, not a mill.
We had them in because we have been receiving a significant amount of material that does not meet the ASTM spec that we specify in our PO and that they (and the mill) agree to.
It came out in the meeting that one of their quality objectives is to minimize returns. And this objective applies to sales and warehousing. They get penalized if they go over a certain limit. And they are upset because we have had a lot of returns in 2007.
Well - tough. The standard is the standard and you agreed to that.
Anyway - I see this "objective" as a problem for me, the customer. To me this says that the sales group is incentivized to talk their customers in to not returning out of spec product. They are NOT incentivized to do a real root cause and go back to the mill or their handling processes.
In fact, the tact they've taken is that they can resell the stuff we return to another customer, therefore it's not defective and they refuse answer the SCAR with a real corrective action.
Am I being petty or is this just wrong?
This supplier is a distributor, not a mill.
We had them in because we have been receiving a significant amount of material that does not meet the ASTM spec that we specify in our PO and that they (and the mill) agree to.
It came out in the meeting that one of their quality objectives is to minimize returns. And this objective applies to sales and warehousing. They get penalized if they go over a certain limit. And they are upset because we have had a lot of returns in 2007.
Well - tough. The standard is the standard and you agreed to that.
Anyway - I see this "objective" as a problem for me, the customer. To me this says that the sales group is incentivized to talk their customers in to not returning out of spec product. They are NOT incentivized to do a real root cause and go back to the mill or their handling processes.
In fact, the tact they've taken is that they can resell the stuff we return to another customer, therefore it's not defective and they refuse answer the SCAR with a real corrective action.
Am I being petty or is this just wrong?
Jim, you have put your finger on it (be sure to wash your hands!