Greenslade at WAFD: Know the Standards & Your Supplier

John Wolz

Understanding and adhering to fastener standards “lowers the cost of doing business, making both users and suppliers more efficient and more profitable,” Joe Greenslade told the Western Association of Fastener Distributors.\
Greenslade, director of engineering technology for the Industrial Fasteners Institute, represented the Fastener Industry Education Group, a joint effort of the National Fastener Distributors Association and the IFI.
“Fasteners are engineered components. Standards are the foundation of the fastener industry,” Greenslade declared. Adhering to standards increases efficiency and results in “less time spent arguing with end users or suppliers.”
“Know your suppliers, Greenslade urged. “Buying fasteners based on an email solicitation by an unknown supplier is a very dangerous way to do business.”
“A supplier’s ISO 9000 certificate is not enough evidence of product quality,” Greenslade added. Visit and audit a supplier or hire a consultant to check them out.
Tests and inspections should be performed internally or by competent outside testing subcontractors anywhere in the supply chain. “At a minimum, the manufacturer must thoroughly evaluate the fasteners,” Greenslade said. “Using randomly selected samples of the correct lot size provides the confidence that a given lot of fasteners meets the requirements of the applicable standards.”
Records of the evaluations of every lot of fasteners “must exist at one or more places within the supply chain and must be maintained for at least one year.”
“Don’t guess what a customer needs,” Greenslade emphasized. Be aware that “99% of customers don’t know the standards or how fasteners work.”
Though the end user should specify the right product, “the supplier should still ask questions. Be a pest.” If the customer doesn’t provide the information you need to supply the correct fastener “that may be the greatest order you ever lost.”
“It is much cheaper to resolve unclear information in the order stage rather than after parts are made,” Greenslade pointed out.
“Complaints about quality should be examined to find the true ‘root cause” of the issue as quickly as possible. Samples of both the failed fastener and unused parts are necessary for evaluation.
“I did not make it, I only sold it,” is not a defense, Greenslade counseled. “Generally everyone within the supply chain ends up being named in a lawsuit.” Fastener failures can involve both civil or monetary and criminal penalties.
A lesson learned from the U.S. Fastener Quality Act process from 1984 to 1999 was that the instances of fastener problems leading to the FQA were “clearly fraud” rather than failures of the actual fastener.
The FQA could have been worse, Greenslade noted. “Some proposals were very scary,” he recalled in citing the example of a proposed requirement to scrap entire lots of fasteners with even insignificant variances.
FIEG is trying to avoid fastener failures through proactive education. Greenslade quoted a U.S. government statement during the FQA process: “If the fastener industry had policed itself we would not be trying to solve your quality problems.”
It could happen again. The toy and food recalls of the past year have led to government investigations.
“If you don’t take care of your own industry, the government will get helpful,” Greenslade warned. E-mail: jgreenslade@indfast.org �2008 FastenerNews.com