One product in the line of food-packaging machinery we manufactured used a large 12kW servo motor. It was very costly, and it was rated IP69 for use in this washdown environment. After a few years and some 30-plus motors in the field, we began to get warranty claims for failed motors. The motor manufacturer quickly identified water intrusion as the problem and cheerfully honored the warranty on the first two motors, but as more failures on these $10k motors came in, it became more reluctant to honor the warranty.
We examined the machine design, and the manufacturer's people also reviewed the application. We came up with no hint as to the cause. Then somebody at the motor manufacturer happened to notice, "Hey, these guys have bought almost 50 motors and drives from us but never bought a single cable. What's up with that?" It turns out that our local distributor of these motors and drives had a brother-in-law who was in the cable business. So every time we placed an order for motor, drive, and cables, the motor and drive order went to the manufacturer. The cable order, however, went to the brother-in-law.
Now a big motor like that is going to get hot, and since it's sealed IP69, it needs a vent. The motor manufacturer came up with a clever solution -- it ran a vent hose through one of the unused locations in the Cannon plug for the power cable and up into the cable some distance. This provided the necessary pressure equalization while protecting the vent hole from intrusion of water.
It turns out the brother-in-law's cables did not have this feature, which left the vent hole in the connector open. That was enough to allow it to suck in water when the hot motor was hit with colder water during the daily washdown. OK, so now we know the solution, but five years later, lawyers were still arguing over who pays for all of those bad motors, and the manufacturer no longer uses local distribution -- all sales are direct from the factory.
Our argument was that we placed the order for a complete package of equipment with the authorized distributor, and any problems arising out of how the distributor processed that order was between the distributor and the motor OEM. And furthermore, never having seen a "genuine" cable, how were we supposed to know that these were bogus cables, since they were delivered by the manufacturer's authorized distributor?
This entry was submitted by Kim Ground and edited by Rob Spiegel.
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Substution is almost never done except by prior arrangement or explicit communication. While there's always exceptions, I'm going to say every purchase order released has manufacturer and part number listed on each line.
There's one exception that I know of that happened all the time to me, and I could never get around it. Ball bearings.
I hold the opinion that SKF bearings are superior, and ordered them for my projects. I routinely received instead a Japanese or Chinese equivalent instead. That substitution happened with almost every bearing ordered, without permission.
As is obvious from the ensuing discussion, this ends up being a legal debate. Unfortunately, the manufacturer (customer) who was using the motors is the one who ends up taking the financial beating.
I agree that the distributor should be held liable, but it is a problem of pocket depth. Many distributors have nothing but a cell phone and a rolodex. We could have taken everything this distributor owned and probably not covered the lost production cost for even one motor failure. (These motors were on yogurt packaging machines that produced 24 cups of yogurt per second 20 hours a day.) Hell, we could probably have put him in jail, but who does that benefit? It doesn't get anyone's money back and just ends up costing society to house and feed the miscreant.
On the other hand, I as the purchaser have a right to expect that a person who presents themself as a representative of a company is either going to be backed up by the company when he speaks officially for them (i.e. by accepting and delivering an order), or is going to be removed from the scene by the company they claim to represent. It was well known and accepted by all parties for years that this guy was in fact a distributor representative of the genuine manufacturer, and that is where the motor manufacturer's liability in this case arises - for failing to exercise due diligence over the conduct of their official representative. (In my opinion) And the manufacturer, to whom this whole problem is a small part of their total business, is much more able to make the damaged parties whole.
It could even be argued that I as the designer had ultimate responsibility for the suitability of the product for a particular purpose. (That arguement would certainly hold up if all of the parts had come from the proper source and had failed in a similar way.) The ultimate extension of this premise is that only the end user is responsible for any kind of failure arising out of a design feature and not an obvious manufacturing flaw. Many lawyers have gotten rich over just such cases.
1) Being from a reputable manufacturer, I 'm confident the motors were actually tested by the manufacturer for IP69. I'm also confident it was tested with proper cables and not the bogus ones. In fact the need for that particular design feature probably came to light as a result of the testing.
2) I left the company before the lawyers got done with it, and don't want to rub salt in someone's wounds by calling around to see what the outcome was.
3) Motor, drive, and cables are not conveniently sold as a set because:
a) different applications call for different cable lengths or even styles (standard or extra flexible)
b) warranty and replacement parts orders would necessitate breaking up the sets, and it would then require an extra level of scrutiny to determine whether a user was 'permitted' to buy a component separately. If someone at the manufacturer looked at the distributor's orders as a group the situation then came to light when it was noticed that they were ordering a lot of motors and drives but few if any cables. But it is doubtful anyone would have noticed just by looking at the orders on an individual basis.
4) Yes, I would call it fraud, but the perpetrator would probably point to:
a) the fact that his cables, though nicely labelled with the genuine manufacturer's same part number, (probably) did not have the genuine or brother in law manufacturer's actual name on it anywhere.
b) the fact that the distributor sold parts from a number of manufacturers and probably did not have a contract that required him to give all parts of the order to the genuine manufacturer . "Oh, we assumed they wanted to save a little money by buying these 'third party' cables, like many of our other customers..."
c) had we asked the right question the distributor (probably) would have disclosed that the cables were made by others.
d) And, if they were smart in addition to being dishonest, the distributor would have arranged the invoice in such a way that sourcing the cables from another manufacturer could not be ruled out by the language of the invoice.
e) the fact that we did not say "... and we want genuine cables with this order, not any third party stuff that may be available."
By and large the cables were pretty good or the whole operation would have come to light sooner. For instance if we had had an electrical failure in any cable it would have been returned to the (supposed) manufacturer who would immediately identified it as bogus. Or if we had received any cable that was not as ordered, or if any shipment was delayed significantly we would have been directly back to the genuine manufacturer to follow up and the problem would have come to light. The fact that they got away with this for years and presumably with other customers as well is testimony to the fact that the cables were probably perfectly adequate for many users.
Frankly the term 'piracy' never came to my mind in this case, nor was I particularly upset or feeling personally cheated when the circumstances came to light. I took it as just an amusing look at the relations between a manufacturer and their distributor, but then none of the costs came out of my pocket, and those costs were surely significant to everyone involved. But in fact piracy is exactly what it was, and as usual with piracy the consequential costs just to the end user alone for lost production exceeded the value of the (quite expensive) cables by several orders of magnitude.
It looks like the problem went beyond the manufacturers in-house Q.C. process. I am wondering why the motor, drive, and cable weren't sold as one unit to the distributor - that would have eliminated inadequate part swapping...
I've got to wonder if the unit passed IP69 with the brother-in-law's cable or if the unit went to testing with the good cable and then when the unit went into production somebody started purchasing the cheaper cable.
Beth, I guess it would also depend on the agreements between the distributor and the manufacturer and the distributor and the customer. It is really incumbent upon the manufacturer to vet the distributor and to train them. That is probably why the manufacturer only deals direct now.
This is a good example of conterfeit parts (parts being cables). In my opinion, the distributer was guilty of fraud. At the very least, the brother in law was guilty of bad cable design.
I agree, the distributor should be liable for the failures. This reminds me of when I was working at a Mitsubishi dealership... There was an emissions recall for the automatic transmissions on some vehicles. Apparently the spring used in one of the check balls was too stiff delaying actuation of the lock-up torque converter. The factory authorized recall involved tearing down the transmission and replacing the torque converter and the valve body, but the dealer had other plans. They purchased a case of retractable ball point pens which had a spring in them which was similar to the spring in the factory replacement valve body so they used those springs in the original valve body instead! This allowed them to bypass transmission removal and repair by simply dropping the trans pan and R&R'ing one bolt (the spring cap). I refused to perform any of the "factory recall repairs" in that manner. It was the Parts Manager's brother who came up with the idea and provided the pen springs.
Yet another example of the downside of nepotism. I'm no attorney, but it seems to me that the distributor should be held liable for this given that they were the source of the faulty cables.
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