Ron,
What you said really rings half-truths here because if I hold up a job because the print is screwed up, I'm the one who catches the crap, not the provider of the print. This place is riddled with "we think we know what they meant" and it drives me nuts. We just had a major screw up here based on a bad customer print and the machinist almost got fired for it. When I found out about it I went to the head of Engineering and told him that if anyone gets fired, then everyone in Engineering should get fired (that includes me). I had thrown up my hands for all the resistance I got from even our QC department and I just let anything through that was submitted by our customers. This part was R&D'd and Engineering had it for weeks before it even went out to the floor and no one ever noticed the screw up on the print. Well, the machinist was no exception but unfortunately he was the one that actually had to make the part and he made it to an ambiguous print. When all was said and done, no one got fired and now it's on the customer to fix the print. In the meantime, we have redlined the print and are making the parts the way the customer "meant" for us to make them. I still haven't heard anything about going back to checking the prints before they get out to the floor so it's only a matter of time before this happens again.
I know it's a little different from approving in-house created prints but I would expect that everyone here where I work should be on-board with sending good information out to the floor right from the start instead of discovering an error in-process and holding up the job and taking a huge variance. I guess I'm just expecting too much from a bunch of old dogs that will not approve of learning new tricks.
Powerhound, GDTP T-0419
Production Supervisor
Inventor 2008
Mastercam X2
Smartcam 11.1
SSG, U.S. Army
Taji, Iraq OIF II