Countries of Origin 3

[marty007]

I work in the pressure vessel fabrication industry in North America, and I constantly see customer specifications that specifically disallow materials from China and the Czech Republic (I don't want to get into right/wrong here, these are customer specs for which I have not power over).

I have some familiarity with the justifications our customers use for excluding Chinese materials (track record...), but I've never understood why the Czech Republic is specifically mentioned.

Does anyone know why Czech materials are often specifically disallowed in customer specs? Is there some ugly history of material quality?

Cheers,
Marty

 

[metengr]

Why don't you ask the customer for the reason? For the company I previously worked we had in our engineering specification a review and approval for foreign sourcing of materials. I had performed several audits in the Czech Republic over the last 8 years (Alstom and another pressure parts supplier) and found no issues with quality of pressure part materials for our purchases.

 

[redpicker]

Prejudice and Bigotry.

If material meets the specification requirements, it should be acceptable regardless of its origin.

If the material does not meet the requirements, likewise, it shouldn't matter where it came from.

Now, if you are buying material from suppliers you do not trust or where you have no recourse if you find the material defective, well, that is a purchasing issue and not an issue with the country of origin.

But, saying no material from China or the Czech Republic in the absence of legal justification is really no different than saying no material from African-American owned or Jewish owned businesses.

rp

 

[marty007]

metengr,
Thank you for your information regarding audits. Unfortunately with our current project, this is a company-wide spec and the individuals we are working with are not aware of the background to the statement.

redpicker,
Those are all fair comments. I guess I'm just wondering if there were any catastrophic historical accidents that have spooked people into blanket excluding the Czech Republic.

Thanks,

 

[arunmrao]

Czech engineering products are well received. Tatra is one such example. In my limited experience, I have never come across any negatives for Czech,Poland etc.

It is like students go to West European countries and we rarely hear any one going to these countries, though in my times learning Russian language was a plus !!

I'm just one step away from being rich, all I need now is money.
( read somewhere on the internet)

 

[jwhit]

I see a lot of specifications stating No Chinese or Indian materials, other times No Asian. Sometimes, North American content only. It's not a problem as far as the material we manufacture, but filler metals can be extremely difficult to obtain. What I've found ironic is that in the case of No Chinese, the finished product is sometimes destined for China. I wonder if they are afraid of their own materials?

 

[RedVette]

Places where corner-cutting has been the predominant trend certainly warrants caution against using their products. But this thread has provoked me to think of situations that might make it harder to differentiate. For example, Thyssenkrupp is a notable Germany-based alloys corporation with several mills operating here in the US. Now what would happen if they bought out mills in the areas of the globe that are currently on the ban-list? Moreover, the flip side equally demands consideration: what if an Asian country buys out mills in the US and starts competing in the market? In other words, is it more of a question of the company's parent country or the location of the material's parent mill?

 

[EdStainless]

It is common for specific components to have CoO restrictions. You see valve and flange restrictions commonly.
This is usually no China or India, and this is based on experience with mis-marked items from these countries.
There is some logic behind this for fabricated items since they often change hands many times in processing.
When it comes to material (plate or bar) it does not make sense. It would be more effective to simply require the fabricator to audit the source, that is from the melt onward. Then they could use any supplier that they wanted to but they would have to prove the supply chain.

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[moltenmetal]

The issue with Chinese material is a) blatantly fraudulent mill certs, which we have documented, and b) the lack of a functioning civil court system where you could realistically seek redress against such a fraud. We buy lots of Chinese material though- in both near-raw and finished product forms- as long as it comes through a distributor who takes on sole financial responsibility for ensuring the quality thereof. The distributor is in a better position to vet the firms from a quality control perspective, and to mutualize the risk of receiving bad material over numerous orders. We mandate additional testing where it is necessary and valuable, and it is usually carried out at the distributor's expense and on their premises rather than in China.

Mandating no Chinese material entirely is not only unfair to the nonfraudulent manufacturers in China, of which there are many, it's also totally impractical. Unless you're special ordering a mill-run quantity, you need to buy what people keep on the shelf, and in many cases that's Chinese material because of cost.

We've had no track record of fraudulent mill certs from Eastern European countries, India or Taiwan- only mainland China. These countries have functioning civil court systems. Our experience with Indian material has been excellent so far.

 

[EdStainless]

We only source custom run raw materials in China and India.
We procure directly from the producing mills, no distributors allowed.
We audit the mills regularly and witness production runs periodically.
We visited 13 mills in that part of the world to find 2 suppliers.
We did not find mills acting fraudulent, but rather they either don't understand the actual intent of the specifications are are lax in enforcing the details.
The local distributors in that region are the ones that I don't trust.

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Plymouth Tube

 

[marty007]

Thank you everyone so much for your feedback. This turned into a much wider discussion than I was expecting.

As a smaller fabricator, it is difficult for us to justify travelling around the world to perform audits, and we rarely purchase enough material to justify mill runs.

On that basis, the costs normally wouldn't justify opening a can of worms trying to get exclusions from long-standing customer specifications. Also we often find there are enough other sources that still meet the customer specs. Regardless we still perform a receiving inspection on all materials.

Thanks everyone!

 

[SnTMan]

Never seen any "No Czech maerial", seen plenty of domestic only and no Chinese. A lot of it, IMO, goes WAY back when poor quality from certain sources was more common and the specs just never get changed.

Regards,

Mike

 

[RedVette]

It also occurs to me that the melting furnaces in China can be questionable as to their ability to yield ingots that are as segregation and impurity-free as other counterparts. I think their computer technology has always been on the tail end, so quality control that relies on their critical control of every step along the furnace process is easily compromised if the more expensive melting methods are not employed. With that said, it's totally understandable for companies to restrict certain critical parts to be fabricated from materials coming from there, as the ultimate risk involves catastrophe.

This may be irrelevant, but the heightened level of mechanical failure in commercial airlines may put extra spotlight on the issue of material origin.

 

[gtaw]

As a customer that is paying the bill, I have every right to exclude certain countries of origin or specific producers. Its my money and I have a voice in where the materials come from or what materials are used. I have no legal obligation to only purchase from the lowest bidder.

As a supplier, if you are excluded, there may be a sound reason or no reason what so ever that I have elected to exclude you as a supplier.

Best regards - Al

 

[moltenmetal]

EdStainless: the distributors we're using are local to us, i.e. they do business and have assets in a jurisdiction in which we can sue THEM if they fail to stand behind the materials they import. They import directly, inspect the mills, and do their own supplemental Q/A, or we don't buy from them.

Despite this, we have had issues- with seamless tubing (tubing being something you know well!)- and they were forced to stand behind the crap they sold us. In that case, it was Chinese origin seamless tubing in 316/L SS which looked perfect everywhere you could see from the outside and which had a lovely mill cert, but which was severely contaminated and/or corroded in the bore, the closer you got to the middle of each length. If we buy Chinese seamless tubing in future, which is doubtful due to that experience, we will need to cut a representative number of lengths mid-length and inspect the bores prior to acceptance- because that's something the distributor just isn't going to do for us.

gtaw is correct that the customer of anything has every right to exclude any vendor for whatever reason they see fit. They are under no obligation to accept the lowest bid proposal, or any proposal for that matter. They can select or exclude based on any criteria they see fit, fair or unfair. It's a different matter for public tenders.

The process of buying something, just like the process of hiring someone, is fundamentally discriminatory, i.e. you are discriminating between vendors or products or candidates to buy or hire the one you want. The key is to ensure that this discrimination is made on bases that actually matter to quality or performance, rather than on bases which are easier to quantify but which have little to no real bearing on quality or performance. Doing the latter isn't just wrong from a moral perspective, it's also a bad business decision.

Many people use brand name or country of origin as a proxy for a proper quality inspection system. A better system is an approved manufacturer's list, where mfgs of a particular product are vetted against certain quality criteria before they go on the list- and the criteria are established such that new vendors can be put on the list if they meet the required standards.

 

[EdStainless]

MM, While I see the logic in your system I don't know of a NA distributor that does on site audits/surveillance in mills in China.
We do buy hollows (both alloy steel and SS) in China for redraw here in the US. We check chemistry, redraw and anneal multiple times, and perform all lab testing and NDT in our facilities.

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