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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.
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!
Actually, I think the lesson here is that when you source material, you need to actually test to see if it meets the specifications. You should never assume that the seller is telling the truth.
How is it "unrealistic" to expect a steel company to correctly produce steel and accurately describe its properties? Other steel companies seem to manage this without issue.
But as another responder stated, if you are a company 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...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seppuku time?
They tried, but the knives were made of Kobe Steel ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
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.
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..
How is it "unrealistic" to expect a steel company to correctly produce steel and accurately describe its properties? Other steel companies seem to manage this without issue.
But as another responder stated, if you are a company 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...
I am not knowledgeable about auto part forgings, but for large steel rotor forgings (20-100 tons), there are about 3-5 reputable companies in the world. The equipment to manufacture such forgings costs millions, the knowledge to make such forgings is highly specialized, the cost of making a mistake and remaking the part is huge, and the volume is in the dozens or perhaps 100s of pieces per year (worldwide). It doesn't make sense for any manufacturing company to make such forgings themselves. Not even GE, Mitsubishi, or Toshiba can justify the capital and labor overhead to make such parts in house.
Obviously smaller parts are a different story, but outsourcing does make sense for most raw material forming such as casting and forging.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Test?! All the time?! Millions of tons of steel?!? Every roll?!?
On September 15, 2014, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol issued HQ H209833, a ruling requiring Mill Test Certification documents accompany ALL bulk metal imports from foreign suppliers.
Domestically, what metal production facilities still exist in the U.S. do MTC testing on EVERY roll of high-carbon sheet steel, and EVERY run of high-carbon steel pipe routinely. And they have been doing so at least since the dawn of nuclear power in this country, because the NRC requires it for pipes used in the cooling systems of nuclear power plants both commercial and DOE-owned-and-operated.
I have a close friend who designed the first industrial-scale bar code printer for U.S. Steel Corporation back in the early 1980's, which they've used ever since to provide a certification paper trail for high-carbon structural steel products for a wide variety of applications. (Sadly, he was unable to patent it, because he was a U.S. Steel employee at the time, so his IP belonged to the company.) They do that both because for certain applications it's a requirement of federal law, and because it provides them with legal cover from liability in case of an accident that involves a product or structure that incorporates their steel.
So, yes: EVERY roll, EVERY time ...
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