Tales from the Quality World- The Buttons

This episode focuses on the same buttons, with two different issues.

Story #1

My contracted supplier made soft durometer garage door buttons similar to those shown in the photo. The buttons came in several different colors: black, titanium, blue, grey, etc. The customer plant put the buttons into an overhead console and then sent the consoles to a tier one who installed it on a car overhead system and that whole system went to the OEM for installation into a vehicle.

One day, the customer engineer calls me and tells me that his customer, the tier one, complained that all the buttons in their inventory were pink. Yes, pink, despite the fact we shipped them in their various colors! Well, to make a long story short, I didn’t figure this out, because it took someone with advanced chemistry to do so.

My customer shipped the consoles in packs of 10 or 12 which their tier one customer put onto flow racks feeding their assembly cell. The aisle behind the flow racks was a heavy use fork truck aisle. Turns out, the molecules from the carbon monoxide exhaust from the gas powered trucks exchanged places with molecules in the buttons causing them all to become pink. Solution? The tier one rolled all the flow racks outside in bright fresh air sunlight and within 12 hours nearly all buttons returned to their original colors once the CO2 molecules leached back out of them.

This isn’t a quality issue I resolved, but it is one to be filed away since one may in the future be involved in setting up a production cell or experience this highly unusual situation yourself.

Story #2

These same buttons were shipped to my customer for a couple years with no issues, then suddenly the customer QE, Shawn, began complaining about the packaging.

The buttons were shipped in a 14x14 box packed in layers separated by a chipboard. Shawn complained that the buttons were falling down the sides of the box inside and due to their soft durometer, the hard plastic backside of the buttons were scratching and damaging the Class-A surface of buttons.

Why did this all of a sudden become a problem? A short investigation by me found that the packaging was customer approved, BUT was approved for use when the boxes were shipped strapped to a pallet. The customer plant, however, had recently implemented what they thought was a cost saving for shipping and our logistics and sales teams that any shipment of a single box ordered was to be shipped via UPS rather than on a pallet. Due to demand cycles, their need for larger quantities had tapered off and they had started getting the boxes shipped by UPS, which as you know, tends to handle packages rather roughly. The packaging was never designed to be shipped in such a manner.

Rather than requote packaging, they went back to ordering quantities which would necessitate pallet shipments.