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Can sustaining engineers change production drawings without product development engineers' knowledge 2

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ThinCap

ThinCap

Mechanical
Oct 17, 2019
34
I am a product development engineer working with this company and found something interesting: once I developed a product and it's in production, any sustaining engineer can change the drawings/parts without my knowledge. I am just wondering if this is also the case in your company or if this is considered as normal? Then why I have to go through all the design review process and sustaining engineers don't have to? Any ISO code says you can't do this? Thanks!
 
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Sounds like your particular employer has an issue if the sustaining team's updates don't have to undergo rigorous review and testing. And yes, its normal and accepted practice for other engineers to come in behind with only the knowledge and consent of management to change your design.
 
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Rigorous review and testing is only for new product. Once it's in production, sustaining can change to whatever they like without any more review/testing. Management is OK with it. A chicken may become a duck.
 
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ISO-900x simply says that you have to follow your own written procedures; the fact that your procedure is crock does not matter to the ISO inspectors.

We once spent 6 months and about $1M (back in 1986) on solving a yield issue, only to find out some obscure "product engineer" had decided to arbitrarily change the recipe, without telling anyone. AND to top that off, that exact problem had been identified in the literature more than 15 yrs prior.

To be fair, most developmental groups have a tendency to toss a product "over the wall" to production, and then merrily head off to their next product.

Nevertheless, even if you had a procedure, agreeing that any given process change is Class 1 or Class 2 can be challenging.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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@IRstuff: good insight. Similar things happened many times here already. I guess we have to wait until somebody got killed by something like this in order to catch management attention.
 
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Let's assume you make a new product which will be based on this product you let sustaining own already. Since they changed it without your knowledge, you are basing your new product on something unknown, right? So whose fault is it in this case?
 
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So whose fault is it in this case?
Click to expand...

Sorry, you own it. You ASSUMED that the process was unchanged, whose fault is that? In an ISO-compliant facility, such information should be readily available on an internal server; if it's not, that's an ISO failure. If someone is changing the process without documentation or traceability, that's another fail. But, beyond that, if you order something online based solely on the picture of the product and fail to read the specification, whose fault is that? Not that I've ever done anything like that, oh no, not me ;-)

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I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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In other words, if you buy a used house with a dead body buried in the backyard, you are responsible for the murder because you own it.
 
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No, because there ought not be any expectation of something like that. For a process you do not own, you can't assume that it's the same as some process from 2 or 3 years prior.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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So if your contractor changed your drawing and caused the problem, you own the problem as the design engineer. This actually happened on the International Space Station: contractor changed the bearings on the treadmill without telling the design engineer because it's a delivered product. The treadmill broke down as a result. Now you want to own the problem you know nothing about?
Now suppose you have a new project: make two of these treadmills so two astronauts can workout side by side. You know you only need to make some connection hardware so you let the same contractor made everything. Now both broke in space. Who is responsible? You?
 
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My design shows German bearings; they replaced with cheap Chinese copies cost only 1/10.
 
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Since you are in Aerospace, what is special in space as long as bearings are concerned? What kind of tests you need to do in order to address these concerns? Check dimensions?
 
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There is often friction, roundness, preload, etc. requirements that called out to support product performance.

The question is that you implied that the "cheap Chinese copies" were presumably inferior to your specified product. That implies that you have some specification that can distinguish the two products. If you cannot specify or tell the difference, then the price is the deciding factor and the production engineers did nothing wrong.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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Well, those have absolutely nothing to do with space.
 
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My past companies project structures were set up with anywhere from a 90 day to 1 year period after start of production that the development team was responsible for changes - production issues, field issues, vendor resourcing. After that sustaining took all that over.

You need a decent sustaining engineering manager to make sure stupid things don't happen in terms of denigrating the original design. Most of the time the Sustaining Manager and the Development Manager report up to the same VP so alignment isn't an issue. Some companies have the Sustaining Manager report up through the factory - not a good idea
 
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