[GMO]

Carlos Leoncini, on 27 November 2011 - 10:55 PM, said:

Hi, I am getting late in this interesting discussion so... I will apologize in advance if I am asking something that was already discussed before. I wonder which is the source of metal??. If you don’t find the source, the sensitivity of your metal detector (MD), will be the least of your problems. MDs should not be used as filters but to monitor the effectiveness of the other steps of your process in reducing or eliminating physical risk. So, in this aspect, my recommendation is to find the source or root cause. Best regards.

Yep you needed to read all of the posts

So, Martinblue, I know it's been a little while but you said last time "a maintenance plan is in place now". Does that mean the equipment wasn't being maintained previously or that a plan was in place to replace it? What was the outcome?

We had an issue recently where we had small (1mm approx) pieces of metal found in one customer's products. Too small to be detected by the metal detector and thin anyway. It took us about a week to find the source becuase we had several false hopes where we thought we'd found it but hadn't. Of course during this time where we were responding and saying "we think we've found the cause, it's "X" and we've removed that from the system..." then another complaint came back, we probably had four in total. It was one of the worst weeks of my life professionally and partially caused by a member of staff not completing a task as thoroughly as they should (an engineer was asked to thoroughly audit a machine and he found no issues, a week later, the cause was found on that machine.) Had the issue continued for longer, we would have lost the business. I can't urge anyone enough that if they start finding metal fragments that they eliminate the cause. Our customer didn't care that a 1mm piece of stainless steel wasn't going to hurt a customer!