Bringing your suppliers into the GD&T fold is a valuable tool for any company that reaches beyond its border for products and services. When everyone in the production chain is speaking GD&T with the same understanding and intent, problems just become easier to identify and correct.
Today's design, manufacturing and quality engineers are faced with the seemingly impossible task of clearly communicating the increasing complexity of surface geometries. The challenge is heightened by the simultaneous reduction in feature tolerances needed to meet reduced size, weight, cost, and time to market targets. These trends are driving the need for unprecedented precision in all technical disciplines.
One of the many challenges we sometimes face with our suppliers is trying to get them to understand the requirements on our drawings. Internally we know we have our own set of challenges with our own people and processes. Here are a few questions the management team should ask:
- Do we have engineering drawings which do not optimally represent functional design intent?
- Do we have daily inefficiencies with employees not trained adequately to "optimally" do their job tasks?
- Do we have ongoing confusion and costly reactions by design, manufacturing & quality due to questionable measurement results?
- Do we continue to have multiple revisions to engineering drawings which impact all departments and delay time to market and ROI?
- Do we have challenges in meeting statistical capability expectations internally and externally? Do we have measurement software truly capable of analyzing measurement data correctly?
- Are we rejecting parts that work or accepting parts that do not work?
- Do we continually attempt to renegotiate tolerances with designers?
If the answer is yes to any of the questions above then what are the financial implications? $ $ $ $ $ $ $
To get to the bottom of these questions it’s essential we have our design, manufacturing and quality “team” fully trained in drawing interpretation, optimization and analysis. It would be tremendously valuable for us to hold a 5-day training session at your facility so we can fully bring our technical staff up to speed and also invite key members of our supplier base to join us.
Looking for information on in-house training programs? Drop us a note requesting information here. |