Alright, for most people who read this a lot of what I say will be inside baseball (unless you happen to work in a manufacturing or engineering related field).
What I do for a living is inspect parts. I use a Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM). This machine uses a software package that allows me to program it to move to specific areas of the part, then a probe will make contact with the part taking a measurement. It is an EXTREMELY precise machine. It must be operated in a controlled environment, no vibrations, climate and humidity controlled as well. As you can see…precision is the name of the game.
As a rule of thumb when I get a blue print from a customer (be it an in house customer, or another company that we are making products for) I use the blue print to write my program for inspection. For the most part blueprints contain all the information I need. They have locations of items to be inspected, and they have the tolerances for those locations as well. That is until yesterday.
We have a customer who we make a part for, this customer then ships our part to THEIR customer. When I inspect the part to the print, it shows some features as being out of tolerance..ie. not good.
But they want me to use THEIR program from THEIR CMM to inspect the parts, but the problem is…THEY aren’t inspecting the parts to the tolerances on the blueprint. Instead, they apply a more liberal tolerance to the part, thus making a part that checks as bad…become good.
I know that the end product goes to someone else, and that the responsibility goes back to our original customer, but it just goes against all I was taught about QUALITY CONTROL. It’s things like this that make America lag behind Japan in quality.
It’s just not ethical to function this way.
There is no point to this post…it was just me venting.
A matter of ethics……………………………….
Posted by Jamie A MacDonald at Wednesday, October 22, 2008
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