A short guide for deciding whether a product failure, quality problem, material change or process issue requires independent technical review — or whether your own team should keep it.
Operations directors, engineering and quality leaders, and general managers who have a materials or manufacturing problem in front of them and have to decide what to do about it — usually without a materials specialist in the building.
It is not a sales document. Several of the twelve questions are designed to establish that a problem does not need outside help, which is the correct answer more often than a consultancy’s website normally admits.
Twelve questions in four groups — cost, evidence, cause and exposure — each with a short note on what the answer tells you and what to do next. Five of them, in outline:
Scrap, rework, returns, warranty reserve, expedited freight, held inventory and the engineering hours already spent. Most problems are escalated on the visible number and turn out to be several times larger.
Failed parts left as found, retains from the same material lot, process data from the period, and photographs. Almost nothing else in an investigation is recoverable once this is lost.
Resin lot, supplier, additive package, regrind practice, tooling, drying, an operator, a shift pattern, a season. The date the problem started is usually the most informative fact available.
A single mechanism and three unrelated ones look identical on a scrap report and need completely different responses.
If there is any prospect of a product-liability, IP or supply dispute, the investigation should be scoped for that from the start — work repurposed as evidence later is weaker.
A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether independent technical review is worth it — and if it is not, you will be told so.
Describe what is happening, what it is costing and what decision is waiting on it. You will get a direct assessment of whether and how this can be investigated.
Discuss Your ChallengeSend the parties and the technical subject matter only — no case details, no documents. Conflicts are cleared before any substantive discussion takes place.
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