... transit bus...
...Screws and bolts started braking on the transit buses....
...the company started sourcing fasteners from China...
I am a mechanical designer - consultant for NFI (city buses) / MCI (transit buses) in Winnipeg, hoping they restart my contract soon.
I work remotely for them from 3000 Km away, NPD = New Product Development, my specialty is the power plant (Diezel-Electric or Propane-Electric) battery racks, including heating-cooling-electrical routing. So pretty much the entire bus is in front of me.
When I am designing thingy's from them I have a library for common hardware, I can see in the system what is a stock currently available and I chose accordingly.
There are hardware engineers - and couple of them specifically for fasteners - doing evaluations and constantly updating the libraries in the system...
The company is buying hardware from a
list of approved Vendors, to get into that list is not so simple, the approval process is couple layers vertically signoffs.
From engineering point I don't care from where that screw is coming from, I need the specs only, numbers...M5x25 hardness this and that, torque value this and that...I don't care for savings, for design my budget is pretty much open.
The
Vendors, suppliers are responsible for specs on that M5 (in example) also they responsible for 10 years of supply backwards on past models.
That is called a PLM =
Product Lifetime Management.
If a Supplier or Vendor drops off the list for whatever reason, hard to believe they can get back easy.
So ship it from China or Pakistan or ... who cares...but there are serious companies out there who want to do - and doing - a
serious Business.