You take your raw material and do X and Y to it. Then you send it to Zammo Industries to get Z done. They ruin the whole thing ( sorry, left it in the bath too long).
Do they pay for the value of the materials only? Not charge for the Z job? Say sucks to be you?
I’m not sure what the reality is in the business world, but I feel like they should pay for everything–the cost of materials, the cost of labor to do steps X and Y, any associated shipping costs. You have to pay all of those fees again, and it’s entirely their fault, so they should pay. And if you lose money because the job is late, they should pay for that, too.
I think the obvious answer will be that this depends on the agreement (contract) between you and Zammo, Inc. Many arrangements are possible.
IME*, if Acme owns the material it sends to Zammo and it is ruined, lost or stolen, Zammo owes wholesale value to Acme. A certain amount of shrinkage is built into Zammo’s bid on the job. Where Zammo loses their shirt is when the actual shrinkage is greater than what is projected. This can vary by contract.
- Fifteen years working in inventory management.
That is my question, what are the various ways this is handled?
For chrome plating the PO states: we never said we could do what you want, we have no responsibility to do what you want, etc. Those are not the actual words used, but what I get from the contract.
Is that common?
Not an engineer, but from what I understand about metal plating processes they involve multiple parameters and can be somewhat touchy, and sometimes several tries using multiple copies of the object to be plated is necessary to get the parameters right.
Given this, if I was a plating company I would write my service contracts so that I was only accountable for the cost of the service, not the material being plated. I would assume that is what they have done. If they will not pay for the cost of producing them item (and I’m not saying they should) your only recourse at this point is to sue them.
Can the item be stripped and re-plated?
I’m guessing cad,anodize,nickle, some kind of plating, or possibly a chem-mill.
Word to the wise, platers suck. Its a crap job and I’m sure they have crap employees that turn over a lot. Some will be great for years and then go to crap and others that were crap get good again. Kind of like when the heat treater is drunk or just delusional and melts your parts, because as we all know an hour at 1650 is the same as a 1/2 hour at 3300. (EX-vendor)
What happens depends on what their policies are and what your PO says, that they accepted. If your PO says they pay all and you don’t have an acknowledged copy, you’re pretty much defaulting to their policies, which is usually at best material cost and at worst you only pay for half of what they screwed up.
Here is a thread on manufacturing message board that you might find interesting.
IANAEngineer either, but in my manufacturing experience, the contract usually has specs that have to be met. Anything outside of spec, short of an engineering permit or deviation, would be considered shrinkage for Zammo amd have to be reimbursed per contract.
The product is rejected for not complying with specifications provided for in the contract. Normally they purchase those parts from you at the value of the stage they are at in your manufacturing process. You and they may bargain for a resolution to minimize loss. An example being they pay for somebody to sort parts that are usable from the defective and they get paid for only the usable parts. They still pay for all the parts they received to make the good and bad parts. There are all sorts of different scenarios depending on circumstances and contracts. Late penalties and and such with a degrade in the preferred vendor rank may also occur, with complete removal from the vendors list after a set number of rejections.
Small world, I was on that site and it was one of the reasons for the question.
The other was a job I had. A plate for a medical mold. Thin heat treated S7 tool steel that had $14,000 worth of wire EDM work done on it that needed to be welded. Welders paperwork had the “sucks to be you” clause, cannot be held responsible, yada,yada.
I was wondering how common this is.