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Japanese Metal Manufacturer Faked Specifications To Hundreds of Companies (jalopnik.com)
Last week, Kobe Steel admitted that staff fudged reports on the strength and durability of products requested by its clients -- including those from the airline industry, cars, space rockets, and Japan's bullet trains. The company estimated that four percent of aluminum and copper products shipped from September 2016 to August 2017 were falsely labelled, Automotive News reported.
But on Friday, the company's CEO, Hiroya Kawasaki, revealed the scandal has impacted about 500 companies -- doubling the initial count -- and now includes steel products, too. The practice of falsely labeling data to meet customer's specifications could date back more than 10 years, according to the Financial Times.
For rockets the concern is less serious as they generally are not built for a long lifespan, but for airplanes and cars this news could be devastating, requiring major rebuilds on many operating vehicles.
As our Granddads believed it was.
This could explain some conspicuous quality control issues in the materials, if so. There could be a huge lawsuit in the works here.
Sell supplies and advertise twice the lifetime they actually have. Fold the company, let the scandal go public after investing in the company most likely to get rich fixing the problems caused by your fraud.
Double the profit, double the fun!
How long until there is a documentable claim that this behavior killed somebody?
Next question that comes to mind: How long until I find out if my car was built with substandard materials?
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
It's a lesson when you put unrealistic expectations on people and their performance.
They will cheat to keep their jobs.
And you have to consider how you compensate people too. Incentives can go horribly wrong. Wells Fargo is a perfect example and the financial meltdown of '08 for that matter.
And when I hear from bankers that Dood-Frank can be repealed because the problems have been addressed, I LOL. No they haven't. And it's impossible to address them. Why? Human nature.
They may have addressed the problems (that they know of) but all you need is one Harvard MBA to start pulling 8 figure bonus checks because of a loophole he found. Then others will follow and we'll be right back where we started.
Uh oh... I just hope that they have not been lying about their steak too!
I'm surprised this wasn't noticed earlier, if, in fact, the changes were substantial. All of the companies described in the summary have their own materials and finished component testing labs to verify strength, fatigue life, hardness, corrosion resistance, and so on. This is both to check incoming raw material and subsequent processing steps. No one in safety-critical industries trusts the word of a vendor without significant quality control agreements and auditing programs.
The Japanese car majors are reporting "no problems" with Kobe aluminum they've tested from the past three years. Japan Rail has said similar about undercarriage parts. There are more years, more metals and more manufacturers involved, but the pattern is clear; these issues will be pencil whipped. There is margin for error engineered into transportation products and no one is going to rip up the floor boards over paper work unless there is a demonstrative problem.
Right or wrong that's how it will be.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Wow, you fucking astroturfers really hate it when I connect the dots for people, don't you?
Seppuku time?
They tried, but the knives were made of Kobe Steel ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
until they can inspect their fleet. They didn't explicitly call the reason out but it's pretty obvious. The best part is these are likely to be structural problems not easily fixed.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I've been hearing about Kobe on English language broadcasts for a while. One constant throughout is a complete lack of contextual information.
We all know they "Falsified data" on strength and durability of aluminum and copper... what does this mean in real terms?. Did they just check the "A-OK" box and fill in fake data without bothering to run the tests? Did they run the tests and then knowingly alter results? What is the difference between what they reported and actual conditions of materials sold? What is the risk? I would be most interested in any references that address these basic questions.
So far every downstream manufacturer who has looked into this has not been able to find anything wrong or at least they are not admitting it publically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
> That is fraud. Whether someone died because if is irrelevant.
It's pretty relevant. If my grievance is that you sold me crappy metal, the resulting litigation will ultimately result in some type of restitution based upon loss of value directly, possible loss of market value, etc. If instead my grievance is that your crappy metal, sold to somebody else, cost me a family member, you are facing a much more open ended amount of damages- you could meaningfully be destroyed by a number of such lawsuits.
How much do you destroy
A few cm^3.
Compare, Japanese metal
Actually, this is a common cycle. Post-WWII, Japanese stuff was considered crap. The country was war-torn and rebuilding its industrial base. Most emphasis was put on volume of production and expansion, little on quality.
As Japan modernized and "got" how to produce quality consistently, it earned a reputation for making the best stuff in the world. Korea and Taiwan followed the same pattern, about two decades behind Japan. (Most of the world's computer components are currently produced by Korean and Taiwanese companies. Even the stuff that goes into Apple's products.) China is currently in the first stage. The U.S. probably went through the same thing after it broke off from colonial Europe.
I suspect however that there's a third stage - complacency and mediocrity. The U.S. went into this in the 1970s and 1980s, which helped Japanese products to gain a fairly sizeable foothold here. Japan seems to be going through this third stage the last couple decades, allowing Korean and Taiwanese products to eclipse Japanese as considered "best" in the world.
> you basically cannot trust ANYTHING outsourced these days, and must constantly monitor it for quality. Which begs the question, why outsource then if you must also incur the added cost of verification and riding herd on QA
Your good options are:
1) Buy from a steel company and test a statistically appropriate number of samples
2) Build and operate your own foundry and test a statistically appropriate number of samples
You need to test either way. The question is, "which is better, buying steel from a company that is good at making steel, or build and operate your own steel company?" If you're in the business of making appliances, or bottle caps, or lawn sprinklers, or anything other than refining steel, buying from an existing steel maker is probably a better idea than launching your own foundry.
Of course there are also two wrong ways to do it:
1) Buy from a steel company and never test any of it
2) Build and operate your own foundry and never test any of it
Either of those will end up with you using sub-standard steel.
Seriously how hard is systemd? So you have to learn something new once in a while. That doesn't mean throw away everything inclluding OS which I seriously doubt was cheaper (man hours, experience, time spent, alternatives required) than just spending a few hours learning how to go from single-layer serial boots to an event asynchronys model..
Actually, this is a common cycle. Post-WWII, Japanese stuff was considered crap. The country was war-torn and rebuilding its industrial base. Most emphasis was put on volume of production and expansion, little on quality. As Japan modernized and "got" how to produce quality consistently, it earned a reputation for making the best stuff in the world. Korea and Taiwan followed the same pattern, about two decades behind Japan. (Most of the world's computer components are currently produced by Korean and Taiwanese companies. Even the stuff that goes into Apple's products.) China is currently in the first stage. The U.S. probably went through the same thing after it broke off from colonial Europe. I suspect however that there's a third stage - complacency and mediocrity. The U.S. went into this in the 1970s and 1980s, which helped Japanese products to gain a fairly sizeable foothold here. Japan seems to be going through this third stage the last couple decades, allowing Korean and Taiwanese products to eclipse Japanese as considered "best" in the world.
The fact that one company got caught doing shitty work somehow translates into the state of quality of Japanese workmanship :/
... they "Falsified data" on strength and durability of aluminum and copper... what does this mean in real terms?. Did they just check the "A-OK" box and fill in fake data without bothering to run the tests? Did they run the tests and then knowingly alter results? What is the difference between what they reported and actual conditions of materials sold? What is the risk? I would be most interested in any references that address these basic questions.
Agreed. All that the outlets I've read have let slip was: 1) there was a whisleblower, that got ignored, 2) all the numbers we've heard: 4% of aluminum sheets & rods, 200 buyers of iron powder, ongoing for up to 10 years, etc.
But what was the whisleblower's observation? Is reporting on that kind of detail just beyond the capacities of English language outlets?
My only guess is products which failed internal testing were by some process packed with good product/labeled as passing, the whisleblower had access to those internal tests but probably company's unclear on who misbehaved. Without internal failed test records, how else would they know "it was 4% of sales"?
Takata, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, scandals just off the top of my head. Japanese workers may still be fanatically devoted to quality but management seems to be cutting corners more and more. Probably due to increasing price pressure from Korea China et. al.
Japanese quality probably reached its zenith in the late 80's to mid 90's.