On 4/2/18 10:09 PM, Charles Farr wrote:
In all this palaver I haven't seen anything mentioned about ISO9000.
This process and quality control system at one time was considered
critical for world market companies. I've bee out of the workplace for
10 years, so I don't have a current perception, but I recall that we
couldn't even market, much less sell our products without the ISO9000
certification. Has something changed?
For some business to business sales, ISO 9001 or AS9001 or similar, is
useful. Generically, they're referrred to as "Quality Management
Systems" or QMS.
Interestingly, a good portion of the suppliers to the cube-sat industry
do not have a QMS - which raises problems when we, at JPL, want to buy
something for a flight project - since we have a rule that "Commodities
for flight projects shall be acquired only from suppliers with an
approved QMS" - so we write waivers.
For sales to consumers, nobody cares. And if you ARE a consumer, and
they happen to be ISO 9000, what that might mean is that they have a
defined customer service process that reads like this:
1) Receive customer inquiry about defect
2) Dispose of inquiry without reading or scanning
3) Log disposal in "discarded customer inquiry log"
These various certifications are mostly about "say what you do, do what
you say, provide artifacts to prove it". And sometimes "what they do"
is nothing.
MFJ could have a perfectly reasonable QMS that specifically doesn't
require inspection of shipped goods or functional testing. You, as a
buyer may review their QMS and say "well, that's not good enough for us"
and negotiate for additional screening or inspection, and MFJ may or may
not be interested in providing such an additional service.
There are also a variety of certifications that sound good in theory,
but in practice are a revenue source for certification and audit
organizations. A couple years ago, I ran across a good machine shop that
didn't have NADCAP (National Aerospace and Defense Contractors
Accreditation Program) certification. In the process of getting the
waiver I found that the reason why they flunked their certification was
that they didn't have "No Smoking" signs posted in the shop floor as
required by the certifier. Inasmuch as we're in California, where for
the most part, smoking in a business has been illegal for 10 or more
years, they viewed the sign requirement as worthless and decided that
they could get by very well without NADCAP, thank you very much.
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