Recently, one of our major customers that we manufacture and assemble products for, started issuing a peculiar amount of RMAs all of a sudden.

For context, we have been manufacturing this product for 10 years and have had practically no returns, but about eight months ago one of the components became obsolete and therefore we’ve depleted our inventory, and there’s no more units to manufacture at this time.

When going through all the paperwork and serial numbers of the units, these units were manufacturer and shipped months and months ago - some cases years. All of which, then were QC’d and deemed Non conformance well beyond 30 days after receiving - only to then hold the paper work months and months and only notify us now.

To me, truly, it seems that they have depleted their inventory and they’re trying to get as many free units as possible via reworking units that they themselves have damaged in their process or from shipping. But moreover, even IF the units were failures from our factory, then it should have been notified within a timely manner to process an RMA - not weeks, months and years later.

How does one handle this situation? I’d really not like to piss of a major customer, but we also cannot be replacing units free of charge for 1) failures well beyond the reasonable return 2) frankly speaking, said issues not being from our factory but from transit/their factory? This is $thousands of dollars but we also do not want to be getting decreased supplier quality scores, especially if said quality issues are not our fault.

But unfortunately, I’m a very small company with about 5 guys and this is 100 million dollar medical company that doesn’t give a fuck.