On the switch it's supply in.and load out.if it's got three positions in general it's on,off,on,if it's a two position switch but a neon light it with have an extra terminal.thats to say three terminals in all,a supply in,a feed out for the load and the extra one for the neutral for the neon return (-) 🙂
- Jun 20, 2005
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See the photos of the stripped down switch. Just a simple on off single pole
- Jun 20, 2005
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Thanks . It is not that kind of switch. Swapping the cables makes no difference to the orientation of the switch
- Jun 20, 2005
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Yes it is just that.
Clearly they have been incorrectly assembled at the factory. Ian explains how it can be corrected. I tried it on an old one. Unsuccessfully.
You need a watch makers vice and tools and magnifier. What if after I had “fiddled” with it it caused a fire?
- Jun 20, 2005
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Eureka!
Prima Leisure have reacted swiftly and resolved the problem👏👏 Here’s their latest reply. It is reassuring they took this issue seriously and found a resolution.
Their positive action is to be applauded in this day and age of customer care.👍
It seems their suppliers/ switch manufacturer incorrectly assembled the switches.
Good morning
Thank you for your email.
We are currently checking the stock to see if this is an error from our supplier, in the meantime we have switched around the switch on two of them and will send these out 1950889 - due to dispatch today.
Kind regards
Elliott
Prima Leisure have reacted swiftly and resolved the problem👏👏 Here’s their latest reply. It is reassuring they took this issue seriously and found a resolution.
Their positive action is to be applauded in this day and age of customer care.👍
It seems their suppliers/ switch manufacturer incorrectly assembled the switches.
Good morning
Thank you for your email.
We are currently checking the stock to see if this is an error from our supplier, in the meantime we have switched around the switch on two of them and will send these out 1950889 - due to dispatch today.
Kind regards
Elliott
|
- Nov 11, 2009
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Good outcome, surprised though that they switched the components around in this day and age.Eureka!
Prima Leisure have reacted swiftly and resolved the problem👏👏 Here’s their latest reply. It is reassuring they took this issue seriously and found a resolution.
Their positive action is to be applauded in this day and age of customer care.👍
It seems their suppliers/ switch manufacturer incorrectly assembled the switches.
Good morning
Thank you for your email.
We are currently checking the stock to see if this is an error from our supplier, in the meantime we have switched around the switch on two of them and will send these out 1950889 - due to dispatch today.
Kind regards
Elliott
- Jun 20, 2005
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Now you know why so many display caravans get canaballised at dealers for workshop supplies🙀
I ‘m confident as a Major manufacturer these guys know what they are doing😉🤞
Do suppliers never check incoming products these days, even just by sampling? They could have pre-empted the problem if they had.
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Manufacturer of caravans or switches. I read it as if Prima did the change. Given neither spotted the error ……Uhm.
I’m not at all impressed by the customer service given in your post #49 they were advising the customer to swap the wires. Come on now just supply the right parts chaps.
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- Jun 20, 2005
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“Major Manufacturer” was Bailey who are Prima Leisure. Their staff did the changes.
The oem was probably somewhere along the Silk Road.
#49. A real worry🙀. But then Clive we are used to this as caravan owners😜
- Mar 14, 2005
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I fully appreciate we all make mistakes from time to time and the supply of the faulty items was not a deliberate or intentional action on the part of the supplier, but it highlighted a company failing which if they had a fully operation quality management scheme in place, the chances of theis failure reaching a customer would have been almost zero.
So the company has failed in one of its primary duties of care towards its customer.
The second failure occured when you reported the fault, and it was handled by an incompetent person. Anyone with the remotest smattering of electrical knowledge would know that an SPST switch is either open or closed, and the the order of the wire connections would make no difference.
It has needed a third action by you to contact the company to escalate the issue. If they had employed a competent person to answer your first contact the problem should have been fully sorted then. Instead it has cost you extra time and effort to resolve the issue, but it has also cost the company probably another £20 or so pounds to answer and escalate your issue on components that probably cost them no more than about £1 each!
What your comment actually shows is how bad the industry is at dealing with product problems. If you are happy with needing to make two extra contacts with a business to sort a simple problem out WHat does it say about the rest of the industry.
There seems to be no will or intrest in the industry that shows the industry is really ready to comply with the CRA's requirement that customers should expect fault free products. The industry has not learned the lesson that doing right first time is a far more profitable approach, and it engenders much better customer relations which would reduce their after sales costs by a very significant margin.
Applause for the actions in this instance is simply reinforcing the present abysmal quality status quo.
If organisations were to stop trying to get "positive feedback" they could redeploy the feedback staff in actually improving customer services or even better, deploy them to man a proper quality assurance process.
Companies can learn a whole lot more from fully understanding complaints than counting positive feed back.
- Jun 20, 2005
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Good post Prof.
But one small point . The guy dealing with the problem did follow procedure and referred it upwards only to be knocked back. He then listened to my next post and pressed on internally. He could have filed it. So imo he did make the effort. If I ’d heard no more I may well have set up a watch repair desk and had a go at Ian’s solution🙀
Roger’s point is the most important. Who is responsible for testing the efficacy of the bought in products? Gas appliances etc🙉
But one small point . The guy dealing with the problem did follow procedure and referred it upwards only to be knocked back. He then listened to my next post and pressed on internally. He could have filed it. So imo he did make the effort. If I ’d heard no more I may well have set up a watch repair desk and had a go at Ian’s solution🙀
Roger’s point is the most important. Who is responsible for testing the efficacy of the bought in products? Gas appliances etc🙉
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I appologise if the company's official you spoke to did as you say, but regardless the net effect was that your issue was not resolved during that interaction, so I stand by my comments regarding the companies approach to QA and customer handling.
The role of a supplier whether the final retailer or part of the supply chain should be to ensure products leaving their care or custody meet the agreed specification. There are several different proven ways of addressing that fundamental activity and two fo the most common are physical inspection of goods as they are received, and more complex to set up but far more effectively is to apply the concept of quality assurance where organisations employ an effective quality assurance system whereby as part of the ordering process suppliers agree to guarantee to only supply goods that have been assembled or manufactured under an externally monitored and approved Quality Management system such ISO EN 9000 series or similar systems operated in specific industries.
In some industries the organisation either opts or is legally required to only buy from suppliers with an externally approved and active accreditation for their QM system. (e.g. Aerospace, most car manufacturers, Nuclear and Mining etc)
This does not eliminate the need for goods inwards inspections but it reduces the need to a sampling process. rather than complete inspection of every item in a consignment.
Specifically for gas appliances in the UK and EU, it is legal requirement the appliance must be manufactured under an externally approved QM system and also have an CA or CE type approval for it to be fitted into a an installation.
Specifically in relation to retail sales which are backed by the CRA, sellers who sell faulty goods are considered to be guilty becasue the goods sold were faulty. Its the act of selling rather than the goods themselves. Retailer have an assumed duty to ensure the goods are free from defects. In reality most don't bother to check their goods inwards for quality just for quantity.
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What you say above is true - in theory. In practice many companies fall short.
As an Engineering Manager I was involved in getting ISO 9000 accreditation and the first thing that struck me was that the Processes and Procedures that are put in as a result do not necessarily guarantee a good quality product or service. All the accreditation meant was that the company was following defined processes and procedures - but these in them self could be flawed because those checking the application do not understand the industry, products or services.
The company I was working for at the time was supplying equipment to other defence contractors. Our quality was so good that our customers stopped incoming inspection and the equipment went straight into service.... with commissioning of course.
Then consider Boeing and the disaster of the Max 8 series. They were allowed by the FAA to self certify and because of other internal issues quality suffered and unfortunately fatal incedents occured.
The FAA withdrew the consent for self certification and took back the responsibilty but I've read in the last couple of days that they are now letting Boeing self certify again but on alternate weeks with the FAA.
Which means I'd like to know when the aircraft I'm about to board was built
As an Engineering Manager I was involved in getting ISO 9000 accreditation and the first thing that struck me was that the Processes and Procedures that are put in as a result do not necessarily guarantee a good quality product or service. All the accreditation meant was that the company was following defined processes and procedures - but these in them self could be flawed because those checking the application do not understand the industry, products or services.
The company I was working for at the time was supplying equipment to other defence contractors. Our quality was so good that our customers stopped incoming inspection and the equipment went straight into service.... with commissioning of course.
Then consider Boeing and the disaster of the Max 8 series. They were allowed by the FAA to self certify and because of other internal issues quality suffered and unfortunately fatal incedents occured.
The FAA withdrew the consent for self certification and took back the responsibilty but I've read in the last couple of days that they are now letting Boeing self certify again but on alternate weeks with the FAA.
Which means I'd like to know when the aircraft I'm about to board was built
Back to origonal switches - just bought some single pole versions( the ones I have in my van stock are double pole) from Switch electronics Ltd ( 5 off for £5.49 inc postage via amazon) and all are correct 1=0n O = off.
- Mar 14, 2005
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As Sam has said, having an accredited QM system does not guarantee that the products an organisation manufactures will be perfect, But what it should mean is that greater care should be taken during design , sourcing and assembly should be better, and the other aspects of an accredited QM system such as taking customer complaints seriously and logging what action is taken to resolve aftersales issues should be used to inform on design and manufacturing processes to improve the product.
This is cyclical process which should incrementally continually improve both product and organisational operations.
Somewhat irrelevant the case of Dusty's switches, where they were almost certainly bought in from another supplier, but the events reported show Dusty's supplier was not checking or assuring the correct components as they travelled through their systems.
This is cyclical process which should incrementally continually improve both product and organisational operations.
Somewhat irrelevant the case of Dusty's switches, where they were almost certainly bought in from another supplier, but the events reported show Dusty's supplier was not checking or assuring the correct components as they travelled through their systems.
We could discuss ISO 9000 condiserably but my take on it was that you could make absolute rubbish products or services but at least with Accreditation you'd do that consistently.
Caravans anyone?
We had Continuous Improvement Processes in place. It resulted in good quality products. Then as a result of a buy out along came the bean counters and couldn't get their heads around this process. The QA department was decimated. Again this was one of the root causes of Boeing's problems.
Caravans anyone?
We had Continuous Improvement Processes in place. It resulted in good quality products. Then as a result of a buy out along came the bean counters and couldn't get their heads around this process. The QA department was decimated. Again this was one of the root causes of Boeing's problems.
- Jun 20, 2005
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The new correctly orientated switches arrived today , first class post. At least they listened and sorted it out,
I suspect by now their supplier will have received a broad side and asked to confirm all the future switches are correct. Those remaining at Prima will hopefully have been returned for testing etc by the supplier.
I wonder how many of those switches have found their way onto the production line? 😵💫
- Mar 14, 2005
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BS EN ISO 900X series of quality management models have evolved over time. Back in the 1980's in the UK it was BS5750, and certainly that was "Say what you do", and "Do what you say", which I agree tended to lock down the production procedures such that any change for improvement was actually difficult to introduce, and it tended to isolate production procedures which ignored the interfaces between them and led to phrase "Yes its rubbish, but it's consistent rubbish! "
Just to be clear a "Process" can one or a collection of "Procedures" needed to complete a process.
The "Quality manual" was both a strength and a weakness because of how prescriptive it was. The standard was "procedure" focused and ignored the wider essentials such as customer focus, and continuous improvement and coherent procedures across an organisation.
As the standard morphed into ISO 900X they introduced the continuous improvement requirement, so standing still was not an option. But equally and changes also had to be properly documented to show the change wasn't a knee jerk reaction, but a properly considered and researched change that would not cause the organisation its suppliers or its customers any negative impact.
The models also changed and included the interfaces between procedures and to ensure a change in a procedure did not cause an issue anywhere else across the whole process
For a number of years I was a quality systems consultant and help to steer several well known companies through re accreditation to revised or extra parts of the standards. I retired in 2005 and since the there have been further changes to the key organisational processes the present standard ISO 9001:2015 looks at
- Organizational Context:
- Leadership and planning:
- Support and resource management:
- Operational planning and control:
- Performance evaluation:
- Improvement:
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- Nov 11, 2009
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BS5750 evolved from Ministry of Defence Standards 05-21 and 05-24, which themselves evolved from US Mil Specs.
In the mid 1970s part of my job was to join assessment teams looking at suppliers quality management systems. Latterly I led some teams. One specific investigation covered a critical submarine system where there had been a problem during live trials. What was revealed was that over a prolonged period of time there had been component level changes, all of which had been introduced correctly iaw the QMS procedures. But the findings of the investigation were that at system level there was no clear responsibility for design authority control. The nett effect was that the cumulative changes to the sytem had introduced a detrimental effect to its overall performance.
After an extensive series of shore based trials involving bespoke instrumented systems and mannequins the problems were resolved, and modifications introduced into the operational boats. Without the ability to backtrack over various equipment suppliers QMS records it would have been times more difficult to focus on those potential equipments that may have contributed to the performance drop off.
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Yes the commercial quality management models were originally derived from I believe the American military which model, which was introduced becasue certain bullets which purported to be a certain size would not work in barrels from a different manufacture yet they were supposed to be the same size. The story I was told discovered the gauges used by the different manufacturers all had different levels of wear and thus inaccuracy, This led to the need to have measurement instruments periodically calibrated against common known references and records kept.
As time has gone by they have expanded and adopted other proven methods of of maintaining consistency but also incorporating managed change for continuous improvement across all of an organisation's activities.
As time has gone by they have expanded and adopted other proven methods of of maintaining consistency but also incorporating managed change for continuous improvement across all of an organisation's activities.
- Nov 16, 2015
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Following on from The Profs last posting, in Aviation, especially the American aviation sector the Military would request for vendors to supply a quantity of items, Nuts, bolts, ignitor plugs etc. The vendor would be chosen and items supplied.
The unbought items would be sold by the vendors, to the civilian market, but as there was no follow up chain to the origin of materials, therefore could NOT be used. But the Part Numbers were the same.
Thankfully the FAA and CAA were on top of the situation and would send out information about the bogus parts.
The unbought items would be sold by the vendors, to the civilian market, but as there was no follow up chain to the origin of materials, therefore could NOT be used. But the Part Numbers were the same.
Thankfully the FAA and CAA were on top of the situation and would send out information about the bogus parts.
In the electronics sector, particularly digital, companies used to produce specific parts for the military. RadHarden, Mil-Std-883, Ceramic, High Temp etc.
As time went on the Semiconductor Companies realised there wasn't as much money on mil spec components. Coupled with the fact that requirements of the military really wanted to use the parts available to commercial computing for example.
Mil spec components dried up but instead the production lines became qualified. Then that disappeared.
One of the problems we faced in our designs was how to use commercial components outside there specifed ratings.
We found a way and a lot of the analysis I/we did was around how we could do that and retain full functionality and reliability.
Safety Critical applications, in which I specialised, were particularly difficult if you had to comply with the highest level of design assurance. This basically said that you could only use components that had been used and approved before. Very limiting if you're trying to do things you've never done before.
Again we found ways around that by undertaking component analysis ourselves and controlling the environment in which they worked.
As time went on the Semiconductor Companies realised there wasn't as much money on mil spec components. Coupled with the fact that requirements of the military really wanted to use the parts available to commercial computing for example.
Mil spec components dried up but instead the production lines became qualified. Then that disappeared.
One of the problems we faced in our designs was how to use commercial components outside there specifed ratings.
We found a way and a lot of the analysis I/we did was around how we could do that and retain full functionality and reliability.
Safety Critical applications, in which I specialised, were particularly difficult if you had to comply with the highest level of design assurance. This basically said that you could only use components that had been used and approved before. Very limiting if you're trying to do things you've never done before.
Again we found ways around that by undertaking component analysis ourselves and controlling the environment in which they worked.
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