By now, if you haven’t heard of the Kobe Steel Scandal, you’ve been living in a cave. (Which, in some organizations, is highly probably given that one of the tricks the CFO likes to do to Procurement when fiscal year end is approaching is to lock them in the basement until the mandatory savings objective is reached … hence our post yesterday on why every day is Halloween for some Procurement departments.).
This scandal is scary. Not only because the data falsification on strength could go back as far as 10 years on some batches, and who knows what bridges, high-rises, and busses that steel has gotten into (and even a .1 degradation, while not enough to jeopardize immediate safety, can impact expected life span and increase susceptibility to decay, making safety a concern down the road before inspection and maintenance schedules kick in).
But this brings up a good point? If more companies were doing more spot checks on shipped product and quality, instead of just trusting Kobe, would it have been 10 years before the scandal was exposed. Even if only a small percent of batches are affected, I highly doubt this would have been undetected for 10 years, even if only one bar or sheet in multiple shipments were tested.
This is an example of what happens when finance tries to get too greed or supply chains to lean by centralizing a function downstream. When one party is responsible for everything, one failure can reverberate up multiple chains undetected — and have potentially disasterous consequences. Now one might say this problem is solved by co-locating people on-site, but if those people never leave the site, even though you pay their salary, their work family is the people they work with day in and ay out and the existence of that company is their livelihood. Are you sure they won’t bow into the local culture and, if the culture dictates, defer to authority or collectively hide the shame?
Just like third party audits are needed, for critical materials, so are third party quality tests. Doesn’t have to be you, could be an independent organization set up between your co-opetition that does random independent quality spot-checks on 1 in 10 shipments and shares the data with everyone.
Just like a good Chef would never use an ingredient without insuring it’s quality, a good Procurement organization should never let a shipment be accepted without a high degree of confidence that it’s a quality shipment. And confidence like that only comes from organizational testing or trusted third-party independent testing. So don’t get too lean or too cheap — your organization, and the lives of its customers, could depend on it.