I worked for a while for a vendor that produced some critical components for ... let's say major entities. NASA, US military, Boeing, and so on. I was in electrical QA, next-to-last step before shipping. My job was to electrically scrutinize individual pieces (in some cases) or random samples from a batch (depending on how much the customer was paying) and compare their output to customer's spec.
If your stuff is mission critical, if anybody could potentially die, you really can't trust the parts from these vendors. A few of their smarter customers would repeat all of our tests and send back defective parts. The thing was, we had a lot of borderline stuff come through from bad production (poorly paid or poorly trained staff or defective tools or materials), and once some of these parts hit QA, they had a lot of expense sunk into them. The company didn't want to eat that cost, so there were a lot of arguments between myself and the general manager. I failed a lot of stuff that previous people in my position had let slide.
They also had a really stupid hockey-stick output graph each month. The beginning of the month was slow, we were all cleaning our work areas and retesting our test equipment, and then the last week of the month they'd try to produce 90% of their expected output for the month. Because of my reputation for rejecting stuff, he'd hover over my work area for the last day or two each month.
Given the size of the company I worked for, I have to assume this is not uncommon practice.
It was a heck of an experience, I finally got a better understanding for why so many things seem to break all the time.
If your stuff is mission critical, if anybody could potentially die, you really can't trust the parts from these vendors. A few of their smarter customers would repeat all of our tests and send back defective parts. The thing was, we had a lot of borderline stuff come through from bad production (poorly paid or poorly trained staff or defective tools or materials), and once some of these parts hit QA, they had a lot of expense sunk into them. The company didn't want to eat that cost, so there were a lot of arguments between myself and the general manager. I failed a lot of stuff that previous people in my position had let slide.
They also had a really stupid hockey-stick output graph each month. The beginning of the month was slow, we were all cleaning our work areas and retesting our test equipment, and then the last week of the month they'd try to produce 90% of their expected output for the month. Because of my reputation for rejecting stuff, he'd hover over my work area for the last day or two each month.
Given the size of the company I worked for, I have to assume this is not uncommon practice.
It was a heck of an experience, I finally got a better understanding for why so many things seem to break all the time.