A serious case of component overload

8/10/2010 8:00 PM EDT

Thanks for this hilarious story! It not only illustrates the frustration of many big company bureaucratic ways, but also what can happen when non-technical employees acquire just enough technical knowledge to be dangerous.

I hope you invited the purchasing agent down to the dock to show him what a couple megohms looks like when you create it out of 1 ohm resistors!

8/12/2010 10:40 AM EDT

It is so fun to read this real-life story!
Well the company can afford it, why not :-)

8/13/2010 3:11 PM EDT

Good story, Chuck. Edsel Murphy wins again.

And any logic function can be created from an infinite supply of NAND gates ...

And when the schematic shows all those Vdd decoupling capacitors in the lower left corner of schematic sheet 2, do not be surprised if all the Vdd decoupling capacitors show up in the bottom rear corner of your prototype pcb...

8/13/2010 4:19 PM EDT

Great story.

8/13/2010 5:57 PM EDT

It is always so interesting that our purchasing people believe that they are far smarter than the engineers. This is a quite humerous example.

8/13/2010 6:39 PM EDT

A large company I worked for in the 70s needed to keep PC board holes clear of solder when going over the wave. (SMT was pretty exotic stuff back then.) Looking for a better solution than applying liquid solder mask, we found that plain old wooden toothpicks stuck into the holes of our single-sided boards did the trick with a lot less labor. Somebody instructed our purchasing dept. to buy 1000 boxes of toothpicks. When they arrived, the guy on receiving dock called the buyer and asked him to take a look at the shipment before he unloaded it. What he actually ordered was 1000 CASES of toothpicks, each containing about 100 small boxes of them - a few pallets worth. I think the total was something like 2.5 million toothpicks. Oops.

8/13/2010 7:45 PM EDT

What a great story. Now if you take 1,000,000 one ohm resistors and solder them together in series how many ohms does the resulting "mega" resistor have? Certainly all those solder joints will become a significant contributor. I guess it is not always the case that 1,000,000 times 1 = 1 x 1,000,000.

8/16/2010 1:26 PM EDT

I love the story! After seeing these things happen all the time, I created a way for Engineering and Purchasing to make sure they are on the same page.

Industrialinterface.com

8/17/2010 12:43 PM EDT

Lets do the Math:
1) There are 126 values 1% values between 5Kohm & 100Kohm as per EIA series E preferred values.
1.1) Purchasing 100 of each you'll buy 12,600 units, @ 0.10$ each that's 1,260$ + shipping

2) The sum of "one of each value" is 4,013,460
2.1)To make 100 of each, you need 401,346,00 1-ohm resitors.

3) If you select 4.99K, 10K, 20K, 30.1K, ... 100K the sum "one of each value" reduces to 556,890.
3.1) To make 100 of each, you need 55,689,000 1-ohm resitors.
3.2) at 0.01$/unit (volume discount) that's 556,890$ + shipping.

You got to ask yourself:
a) What Director/V.P. would sign-off on this purchase? Both on the requestor & vendor sides.

b) How many should be terminated for this 1/2 Million$ "Mistake"?

c) Did the vendor take back the shipment, or did the engineer make do with the delivered materials?

8/17/2010 3:22 PM EDT

Of course I blew my top at first and then I settled down to explain to the purchaser that what he was asking me to do was absurd. Of course he tried to justify his purchase so I went to my boss just to avoid further confrontation. He took care of the situation and both pallets went back and my original request was handled like a normal purchase. After another couple of weeks of course.

8/19/2010 5:32 PM EDT

Wow! This is an excellent example of how some purchase guys screw up things especially in big companies where its easy to start the blame game. I remember once the purchase guys bought 100 SRAMS instead of crystals, problem of part numbering!

8/20/2010 4:44 AM EDT

I had a similar experience one time. Long ago the spanner size of metric 3mm nuts changed from 6mm to 5.5mm. So I filled in a form to order two ring-fork spanners 5.5mm from the high quality tools firm Belzer.
Several weeks later I was called that my shipment had arrived and that I better bring a cart.
In the wharehouse two large wooden cases stood ready for me. After opening I found two large 55 mm spanners, about the size you would use on an oilrig ...

8/25/2010 3:52 PM EDT

Oh yes there are few smart purchase guys also who sometimes solve many component problems. I remember a buyer who was so quick to track many memory chips and other components in the board. In all the project meetings he had very smart inputs on components. I really feel the buyers and purchase guys play very critical role in the product roll out.

9/2/2010 7:16 PM EDT

Let's not forget the several months of technician time it would take to make a few 100Kohm "resistors" from 1ohm resistors. Compare the annual salary of a tech soldering for weeks on end to the 1 cent cost of a 100Kohm resistor!

11/24/2010 5:32 PM EST

Many years ago when I was in the employ of the US Navy I was stationed at a Naval Air Station located in the Central Valley of California many, many miles from the ocean. One of the avionics techs ordered a couple of 48 volt relays to repair an inertial navigation computer. A couple weeks later the parts that were requisitioned arrived. A phone call was received asking for someone from the avionics facility to come on over to the receiving warehouse to retrieve their parts. Upon arrival there was a large flatbed truck sitting there with a pair of propeller shafts for a submarine along with paperwork indicating it was meant for the avionics facility. It turns out that all parts were ordered using their NSN (National Stock Number) identifier and not a vendor part number. Someone inverted a couple of digits in the NSN when filling out the ordering paperwork and ended up ordering submarine propeller shafts instead of the intended relays. Needless to say the shafts were returned to stock.

11/24/2010 9:02 PM EST

An interesting story about purchasing, indeed. The purchasing agent certainly was helpful.
I once had an interesting problem with a small circuit board that I had designed. My tech had assembled it and when he went to calibrate it, nothing was even close to what should have been. He pointed out that he had carefully checked the PCB against the circuit drawing, and verified the resistor values with an ohmmeter. But it did not look right to me, and it certainly did not work like the first prototype. I went back to my pencil drawn original circuit and discovered an interesting problem, which was that the detailer who did the final drawing had corrected my mistakes, where I had left the "K" off a bunch of resistor values. This had been done "after I failed to catch my mistake", and signed off on the drawing so about half of the resistors were a thousand times the correct value. I marked up the release drawing and explained the problem to my tech, who corrected the board.
I did wind up explaining to that detailer that if he thought that I had made an error, he would point it out to me and ask about the correction. I assured him that when my mistakes were caught, I did appreciate it. Fortunately only the first circuit board was assembled incorrectly, so the cost of the error was small.

11/26/2010 1:01 PM EST

Do not forget the receiving department in large companies, they are a source of amusement too. One of my fellow engineers had ordered a microwave antenna that had a lens attached to it. The receiving department had unpacked it and then notified the recipient that his antenna was here, but that they had a difficult time getting all that styrofoam off of it. The recipient discovered that they had picket the lens portion apart, not knowing what it was. The replacement was ordered with strict instructions to deliver the box to the recipient UNOPENED.

11/26/2010 1:09 PM EST

Second receiving department horror story: I had a software subscription and each quarter I would receive a large box of manuals and tapes. The first box arrived and they very properly received it and delivered it to me. The next quarter it was late, and after three weeks I asked the vendor when it would be shipped. It had already been shipped and "so-and-so" had signed for it. So I went to the receiving department to get it and was told it was not there, but I could see it on the shelf. I stepped over and grabbed it but then was told I had to sign for it. No way I said, it is not here, you said so. And if it gets delayed next quarter, I will send myself a dead fish. Never had any more problems.

11/26/2010 1:22 PM EST

Thank god for we have 100 K resistors. Life would be so much difficult, if we dint resistors in excess of 1 ohm value!