GPI 191 – Teach your employees how to reject faulty or bad purchases / incoming receipts.
Do your employees know or recognize when your company has received a substandard product or service from your vendors? Are they trained to spot problems or irregularities that will cause problems later? Your purchasing department needs all the eyes and ears of all of the employees in order to get restitution for bad products or service purchased and paid for by the company.
Teach your employees to spot problems to file claims with vendors. Instruct your employees to notify purchasing the same day upon seeing shortages or product failures that occur or are known within the plant. You buy too many things and have too many deliveries every day not to have your employees trained to spot problems.
Teach employees to document details of discovered problems. Instruct them formally to write down all of the details observed and convey this information to receiving and purchasing personnel. Make these standardized in your training and covered under your authorized company procedure. It is most likely already part of the quality control procedures so it needs to be trained again for those unaware of the guidelines.
Examples of rejected parts, incorrect receipts or vendor product or service failures might include:
- Bad or faulty receipt of shipping supplies.
- Incorrect or deficient load of quality control, laboratory or testing supplies or equipment.
- Shortages or incomplete shipment of welding rods, metal and other various supplies.
- Incorrect maintenance equipment and replacement parts.
- Faulty cleaning agents or incorrect shipment of cleaning rags, wrong uniforms, industrial gases.
- Shortage of screws, nuts, bolts, wood, plastic parts, metal fasteners.
- Wrong sized replacement belts for company machinery.
- Out of specification components, painting, finishing, packaging.
- Incomplete or inadequate outside services.
- Missed delivery deadlines of purchased parts or supplies.
- Incorrect sized pallets or wrong size boxes and wrapping packages that do cannot contain our product or do not fit into the storage racks in the warehouse.
- Wrong raw materials delivered in wrong sizes or types or grades.
- Wrong chemicals and wrong quantities.
- Expired products billed as new or fresh and current.
- Leaking or punctured bags of chemicals, materials which were damaged originally by the vendors’ drivers before they arrived at the plant.
- Damage to employee automobiles by sloppy lawn care personnel or hit, damaged or backed into by onsite contractors’ trucks or vehicles.
- Parking lot damage incurred to cars or trucks or company buildings, sidewalk railings and fire hydrants stemming from customers’ trucks driven carelessly.
- Delivery men leaving prematurely and missing parts of the scheduled delivery still remaining on the truck.
- Delivery men leaving without obtaining authorizing signatures of receipt and recording accurate dates that product was actually dropped off and received at the company.
Involve and encourage all employees to spot problems. All employees need to be trained to report purchasing chargebacks or vendors’ product failures. There are many things employees can be trained to do in order to save the company money. They need to be aware of their need to report when products and services are either not received as planned or they fail in service. Everyone knows when a purchase has gone awry. It needs to be reported that same day in order to notify the vendor.
Teach more than one person in your shipping department how to return purchases to company vendors. This requires, many times, getting approval from the company where the purchase started. Many require an authorization before you can ship anything back. Teach more than one person how to do this every day if necessary. All occurrences are reportable to purchasing for reimbursement and will save the company money.
Teach your employees about asking about warranties on company purchases. Teach your employees to inquire about maintenance warranties to see if your company is owed any money when a piece of equipment fails. When the vendor replaces a part, they should give the remaining on the other part that failed. This is most likely more familiar to people when their car batteries fail. Most know the battery carries a multi-year warranty towards the purchase of the next battery.