United Lens Company has been building custom optics for over a century with customers from medical to aerospace, and in the past ten years has seen a marked increase in the desire for material testing and traceability. Initially, internal efforts to dispose of raw materials, long un-used and untraceable, were met with some skepticism from our financial leadership; but, as Joe Buccino, spokesperson for a Boeing supplier was quoted in a recent Reuters article saying “Documentation compliance is critical in the aviation industry”, and we at ULC believe it is critical in all of the precision manufacturing world. In the article Lambert and Shepardson state “Boeing asks suppliers for decade-long titanium paper trail as check for forgeries widens” – this is not an unfamiliar scenario for us at ULC. As consumers we want to believe that the manufacturers have done their due diligence with integrity, from purchasing through final inspection.
Lambert and Shepardson write “reports of forged documentation initially raised concerns about the structural integrity of some aircraft”. Unfortunately, counterfeit material and paperwork is also something we’ve become quite familiar with. In the best cases, we’ve been able to help our customers with the material testing they required to set their supply chains to right. At the worst, we’ve lost customers by refusing to supply or edit erroneous records.
We do our best to educate our customer base material substitutions when they’re possible, and especially for questioning suppliers whose prices seem “too good to be true”. Let’s face it, custom optics are expensive and material requirements are not always well defined. Here, we do our best to quote what we are being asked for and offer cheaper alternatives if they exist, but we will never intentionally certify a material as something it isn’t. In the event our customers are able to command better material prices, we’re happy to have them send that material to us for manufacture, too—fully traced from receiving to shipment.
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For more information and tips on how to avoid falling victim to an issue that affects our optics manufacturing industry, check out our ebook “the importance of correctly specified glass” or contact us today!
