The Garden of the Blind

One of the primary responsibilities that I have at work is to review technical documents that are submitted by various companies that we do business with and either give them my blessing or turn them down. This last week, I have had six documents pass across my desk. I rejected all six. Two of the documents were especially rejection-worthy. They were source approval requests.

When a company wants to do work for us, a standard course of action is for them to seek approval as a source, either to manufacture the part or to repair it. This approval process is typically guided by a document that in legal-sounding terms states that they can either a) build (or repair) one or more of the part in question, test it, and satisfy us that it meets our requirements, all at their own expense, or b) write us a letter telling us how their previous work is similar to the work that they would do on this part and therefore, they should be able to do our work as well. The latter approach is almost universally followed, after which we pay for the building and testing (see, everybody wins!)

These two source approval requests were different from what one might expect. Instead of explaining how they have worked on similar parts in the past, they went on at great length (20+ pages each) about the wide variety of different parts they have worked on. Neither document made any reference to the part in question after the first page. One of them had a ten page list of parts that they had worked on, all of which were fundamentally different than the part in question. On the first page (and in the only place that they actually named this part), they misspelled the name of the part (to their credit, they just perpetuated a typo that we originated, but it shows that they didn’t even bother to figure out what the name should have been). The other one had an obvious lie as its very first sentence and repeated another obvious lie in two separate places in the document (I called them up to verify the second lie, and sure enough, it was a falsehood).

It was clear that both companies had a broadly written capabilities document that they just slapped a cover page on and sent out, hoping that I would just rubber stamp it rather than read it and try to make sense of its contents. In fact, it took me a while to figure out why I couldn’t make any sense of the contents (it is customary to have about half to three quarters of these documents describe things that are not actually related to the parts at hand, so the total disconnect between the title pages and the rest of the document wasn’t immediately apparent). What galls me is just how lazy that is.

These companies are trying to win us as a customer for these parts, but it looks like they didn’t even take the time to look at the top level drawings to see what the name of the parts really are. I suspect that they have become accustomed to our engineers just granting approval to these sorts of shoddy, half-baked proposals (in fact, I approved one of these two companies for a part recently, and I’ll bet that if I went back, I’d find that the two SAR documents are virtually identical, but in my defense, the part then was actually relevant to the content of the document), and they don’t figure that it’s worth their while to do more work up front. They probably didn’t count on having me comb through their documents and realize that they had made no case whatsoever that we should accept them.

Part of me thinks that I should keep on them so that they’ll learn that they have to actually prepare things before sending them to us, including maybe even thinking for a minute about how the part matches with their skill sets. Another, more cynical, part of me thinks that they’ll just keep on submitting half-bottomed documents and wait for me to proofread them (often for glaring grammatical errors!) and tell them what to do to get approved. I’m getting angry with them, and I’d blacklist them entirely if I could, but such is the nature of my work that I’ll have to keep dealing with these people for some time to come.

So, I give them an open letter: Stop being so lazy! The next time that you submit a letter to a (potential) customer asking to be considered for something, give them the consideration of preparing something meaningful and relevant. When you submit a document as a required delivery for a contract, check with the contract requirements first to see if you’ve met them. The next time you produce a formal document, have someone read over it to catch some of the more outrageous spelling and grammatical errors. I have to be fair to everyone, but I don’t have to trust you, and if I don’t trust you, then you can count on it that I’ll read your papers very carefully, and no one wins when that happens.