What Challenges do you face with Detailers as Fabricators?

As a small private-owned company that designs a multitude of equipment and systems for (mostly) the industrial gas sector (or any industry that might use this industrial gases in their production), I can relate to your struggle. We have a large project going on with a German supplier that also works a customer, and they need a complete system made, where we make 90% of all the parts and assemble it; and the rest are custom components that they send to us that we have to put into the system. Now this system is for "low" pressure oxygen systems (25 bar), and almost none of their custom components are designed (or cleaned and approved for) oxygen service. They then have to call back the parts, send them back to their supplier, get approval for new (degreased and approved) parts, get the new parts, then send them to us for assembly. All the while we just sit there and wait. Not to mention the documentation hazzle related to all this. And I could accept that, if it happened once or twice. But it is mostly the same squabble over and over and over again; with all the same people involved. Anyway rant over.

So in short, the biggest difficulty in day-to-day work? I feel like I am wasting so much resources and manpower teaching the customer on how to do their jobs, and then we get the initial blame if something goes wrong anyway. I remember being at a customer site when they received a batch of our flexible hoses, degreased, capped in both ends and ready for oxygen service. They opened up the packaging, removed the caps and lay the hoses down on the dusty operations floor, while they disassembled the existing ones from the filling system; and when we pointed it out to them we were met with: "oh we always do it like this, we never had any problems, so it cant be that important". No surprise they were later audited by the company central HQ, and it was discovered that they (on average) experienced 4-5 hose ruptures a month due to ignition. The company then sent us a non-conformance letter, stating our products were not properly cleaned for oxygen service.

Dshts1 - there are a few steel fabricators in the structural forum, hopefully they'll find their way over here.

As a structural engineer, I can't speak to your specific pain points, but I can say that having my markups picked up by some of the detailers now is painful. Whether they are overseas or not I can't say and don't really care - but I get very frustrated when I have a very specific detail that I've designed that gets completely ignored for something with half the strength and none of the stiffness, and then it takes 3 rounds of revisions to end up back with the connection I had already detailed. Or when I indicate that a connection needs 3 bolts because there is a point load near it and they keep insisting that 2 bolts can support 1/2 the max UDL and seem to refuse to change it.