Weird and Wacky Engineering
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dbaechtel
Muito Obrigada pela vossa ajuda. Desejo-vos prosperidade.
dbaechtel
THANKS very much for your effort to translate this for the Brazillians. Too bad ...
Where has quality gone…and what can we do to get it back?
Don Baechtel
9/21/2011 4:15 PM EDT
As an Industrial System Engineer with about 35 years of experience, I have noticed a trend over the last dozen years or so: Many of the products and services that we use in our projects, from companies both large and small, seem to have much less quality and support than in years past. The problem has gotten so bad recently that it not only adds significant unexpected increases in project costs and time lost, but it also frequently puts the entire project success in significant jeopardy.
It’s just like when I visit my local big-box store. I have seen the tools there go from a rugged design that were built to last a lifetime, to a greater use of inferior materials that are lucky to last one day of hard work on the job. No doubt, many of these products have been re-engineered after an extended period of competition in the marketplace to increase “efficiency.” That has been frequently misinterpreted by the shortsighted as mostly a reduction in product quality and support purely to reduce costs.
(Let us know what you think about quality in electronics today: Take our short survey.)
At many of the companies where we purchase our system components, nearly across the board, not only are the products of lower quality, but frequently they are not completely developed. Instead, they are “tested in the marketplace.” The documentation is also low quality, inaccurate and incomplete. Companies used to team up product engineers and professional technical writers for extended periods of time to publish well-polished and informative product manuals and documentation. Those times are long since passed. I think that even the company lawyers have added their input and have advised that less said in the documentation equals less legal exposure.
This puts my reliance on the product support groups at a critical level. But here too, in the product support area (apparently to trim costs) the manufacturers have severed any direct connections between their users and whatever product engineers still remain. They have instead put in a layer of “Technical Representatives” who know little of the products or applications between us and the people who can actually help us. These technical representatives work as a filter and can only incompletely parrot the problem and questions to their second tier level of support. If I work hard at it for a very long time, after several weeks I might eventually get a response that might lead me to a workaround for my issue.
Another recent trend is for companies to replace their entire internal Product Support groups with “peer support online Internet forums.” In these online forums, users of the company’s product are supposed to help each other. Frequently, a majority of forum postings that are desperately seeking help with difficult technical issues can go for weeks and months without a single response. And often when a response is given, it is from a source that is uninformed and not helpful. When I question companies about the lack of official responses to the forum postings, their response is that “company representatives regularly moderate these online forums and are encouraged to participate but are not required to do so within any specific time frame”.
Currently, my most effective and reliable tool for product support is a Google search for someone that might mention a problem similar to mine and might have a thread that might lead me to a solution to my issue. This means that a problem can last weeks or months while someone is searching for a solution. Some problems lead to a very difficult decision about rejecting a product or component that has been in development for a significant period of time and replacing it with an alternate component that will come with its own different set of problems to be solved.
You can see how difficult it is for a project team to fight through all of the issues that appear with all of the products and components that we purchase and still through to a project completion within the estimated time frame and budget.
I think that many of these quality and support issues are the direct result, in a difficult economy, of a shortsighted effort to reduce costs for greater competitiveness. A few companies still have internal “Product Quality” programs, but frequently those programs are designed to achieve greater product consistency not product quality. These programs work mostly internally without any customer input. I believe that product quality is purely in the eyes of the customer. But, how can you have product quality without regular customer input into the process? And how can you be competitive if your products are of inferior quality and regularly disappoint your customers?
What happens to us when most of our society competes only on lowest cost? I think we end up with more problems similar to the ones the Chinese society has recently experienced:
• piracy and counterfeit parts,
• intentional contamination with inferior materials,
• early part failure,
• reduction in safety and reliability,
• cover ups,
• stolen intellectual policy,
• resulting in more litigation (in the USA),
• and increasing peer pressure to take unwise shortcuts and cheat the system.
Is this where the U.S.A. wants to end up? I don't think so, and I certainly hope not.
So what can engineers do to help reverse this undesirable trend in reduced product quality? How do you stabilize a system that is running out of control? Answer: You add corrective feedback to the system from an observer.
One possible solution is to find a way to publically acknowledge those companies and products that still show signs of good product quality in the hopes that the recognition will spread. This recognition can then be used as a competitive edge over those companies and products that provide less quality. If the Engineering Society, without managerial intervention, contributed their votes to recognize companies and products that they find to provide good quality, then this recommendation could be used as a buyer’s guide or Angie’s List of sorts to help select products and components that have been shown to provide more reliable quality and fewer problems. This, in and of itself, will help those companies and products to survive over their inferior competitors and help project teams make more informed product choices. Let’s help change a race to the bottom on quality into a race to the top, or at least upwards.
(Let us know what you think about quality in electronics today: Take our short survey.)
It’s just like when I visit my local big-box store. I have seen the tools there go from a rugged design that were built to last a lifetime, to a greater use of inferior materials that are lucky to last one day of hard work on the job. No doubt, many of these products have been re-engineered after an extended period of competition in the marketplace to increase “efficiency.” That has been frequently misinterpreted by the shortsighted as mostly a reduction in product quality and support purely to reduce costs.
(Let us know what you think about quality in electronics today: Take our short survey.)
At many of the companies where we purchase our system components, nearly across the board, not only are the products of lower quality, but frequently they are not completely developed. Instead, they are “tested in the marketplace.” The documentation is also low quality, inaccurate and incomplete. Companies used to team up product engineers and professional technical writers for extended periods of time to publish well-polished and informative product manuals and documentation. Those times are long since passed. I think that even the company lawyers have added their input and have advised that less said in the documentation equals less legal exposure.
This puts my reliance on the product support groups at a critical level. But here too, in the product support area (apparently to trim costs) the manufacturers have severed any direct connections between their users and whatever product engineers still remain. They have instead put in a layer of “Technical Representatives” who know little of the products or applications between us and the people who can actually help us. These technical representatives work as a filter and can only incompletely parrot the problem and questions to their second tier level of support. If I work hard at it for a very long time, after several weeks I might eventually get a response that might lead me to a workaround for my issue.
Another recent trend is for companies to replace their entire internal Product Support groups with “peer support online Internet forums.” In these online forums, users of the company’s product are supposed to help each other. Frequently, a majority of forum postings that are desperately seeking help with difficult technical issues can go for weeks and months without a single response. And often when a response is given, it is from a source that is uninformed and not helpful. When I question companies about the lack of official responses to the forum postings, their response is that “company representatives regularly moderate these online forums and are encouraged to participate but are not required to do so within any specific time frame”.
Currently, my most effective and reliable tool for product support is a Google search for someone that might mention a problem similar to mine and might have a thread that might lead me to a solution to my issue. This means that a problem can last weeks or months while someone is searching for a solution. Some problems lead to a very difficult decision about rejecting a product or component that has been in development for a significant period of time and replacing it with an alternate component that will come with its own different set of problems to be solved.
You can see how difficult it is for a project team to fight through all of the issues that appear with all of the products and components that we purchase and still through to a project completion within the estimated time frame and budget.
I think that many of these quality and support issues are the direct result, in a difficult economy, of a shortsighted effort to reduce costs for greater competitiveness. A few companies still have internal “Product Quality” programs, but frequently those programs are designed to achieve greater product consistency not product quality. These programs work mostly internally without any customer input. I believe that product quality is purely in the eyes of the customer. But, how can you have product quality without regular customer input into the process? And how can you be competitive if your products are of inferior quality and regularly disappoint your customers?
What happens to us when most of our society competes only on lowest cost? I think we end up with more problems similar to the ones the Chinese society has recently experienced:
• piracy and counterfeit parts,
• intentional contamination with inferior materials,
• early part failure,
• reduction in safety and reliability,
• cover ups,
• stolen intellectual policy,
• resulting in more litigation (in the USA),
• and increasing peer pressure to take unwise shortcuts and cheat the system.
Is this where the U.S.A. wants to end up? I don't think so, and I certainly hope not.
So what can engineers do to help reverse this undesirable trend in reduced product quality? How do you stabilize a system that is running out of control? Answer: You add corrective feedback to the system from an observer.
One possible solution is to find a way to publically acknowledge those companies and products that still show signs of good product quality in the hopes that the recognition will spread. This recognition can then be used as a competitive edge over those companies and products that provide less quality. If the Engineering Society, without managerial intervention, contributed their votes to recognize companies and products that they find to provide good quality, then this recommendation could be used as a buyer’s guide or Angie’s List of sorts to help select products and components that have been shown to provide more reliable quality and fewer problems. This, in and of itself, will help those companies and products to survive over their inferior competitors and help project teams make more informed product choices. Let’s help change a race to the bottom on quality into a race to the top, or at least upwards.
(Let us know what you think about quality in electronics today: Take our short survey.)
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Big Paul
9/21/2011 6:37 PM EDT
This happens when decision makers view products as generic things requiring exact knowable resources and time to create, and can be supported by generic low level outsourced script readers.
After the management specified time elapses, resources are reassigned and whatever results is cut loose with a script for someone completely ignorant of the product to read to unfortunate customers having problems.
The best results I see come from small companies with the discipline to release product when complete and maintain people with technical depth to sheppard the product through its life cycle. Such companies actually provide contact information instead of hiding it.
That is a good indicator of what to expect from a company: if they do not provide obvious and clear contact info, runaway! (A support email address that is never checked does not count!)
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Bert22306
9/21/2011 8:04 PM EDT
Whoa! Too many generalities here. I will accept the result of one trend, though. The way over-hyped "lean plus." Which simply means, you have no depth left in companies. An individual employee may be the only expert the company has in any one area, and no plans to hire anyone else until he quits or retires. This creates the highest "productivity" metrics, and yes, manuals probably do end up being poorly written under these conditions. E.g., you don't hire a technical writer, you only hire engineers who have at least some knowledge of written English.
But I'm not sure that quality has gone down, comparing apples with apples. For instance, you might find cheap tools at big box discount stores today, but those stores did not exist 30 or 40 years ago. You can still find the good stuff, just don't try to do so at the giant xMart. For that matter, even 40 years ago you could find cheap junk tools, if you shopped for tools at your local drug store!
An obvious counter-example of the supposed falling quality levels is US made cars. I'm old enough to remember vividly the awfully assembled, badly engineered cars of the 1970s and 1980s. Those years demolished the US auto industry, and so very deservedly. But US made cars today are infinitely better, rivaling any others, even though people who only think in terms of fashionable brand names haven't figured this out yet. It takes a long time to re-establish a reputation that was so thoroughly and deliberately trashed.
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seaEE
9/21/2011 11:49 PM EDT
I have 240,000 miles on my present car with just standard maintainance and have had no major quality problems. It is a quality car.
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Tunrayo
9/23/2011 1:35 PM EDT
Was it a car made in Germany by any chance?
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seaEE
9/23/2011 10:33 PM EDT
No, it is a Japanese car that is probably made in Tennessee. My only complaint about the car is it didn't come with a trunk light. No car should be without a trunk light. My sister got 300k-miles out of her car from the same manufacturer. They were mostly highway commuting miles, but it is still hard to argue with that kind of mileage.
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cdhmanning
9/21/2011 8:05 PM EDT
It all comes from market feedback.
You complain about the quality of tools at the local store. Yes, that $20 cordless drill will probably die within a few months of use, but the high quality tools that builders and tradesmen buy still exist. They cost more though. Those $200 cordless drills work really well and will last a lifetime.
Has electronic component quality really got worse? I guess it depends on how you measure it.
These days a typical cell phone will have perhaps 100 times as many transistors as ten years ago. If the transistors had the same failure rate as ten years ago, we could expect the MTBF of cell phones to be perhaps 1000 to 10,000 times worse than ten years ago (remember MTBF of a system is not linear). That is clearly not the case.
I thus suggest that component quality is generally increasing rapidly but that this is being offset by increasing complexity.
The same goes for software. Individual software packages and tools are improving, but more are used to make a product. That makes it far harder to get the entire codebase defect free.
The same goes for documentation. IIRC, the documentation for an 8051 was around 200 pages - including pretty much everything. The documentation for an OMAP is a few thousand pages excluding the documentation for the CPU core etc. All up it is probably 10k pages or more.
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seaEE
9/21/2011 11:55 PM EDT
Will a modern refridgerator last for 40 years? Will a modern washing machine last for 40 years? Is a digital keypad for inputting an oven's temperature really an improvement over simply twisting an old potentiometer to 375 degrees? Not all changes are improvements.
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Bert22306
9/22/2011 4:10 PM EDT
Maybe even longer than 40 years, unless the fickle and fashion-slave consumer feels the urge to get rid of it first, or what will the neighbors think.
The new appliance designs tend to get rid of mechanical components, like cams and relays, replacing them with dedicated microchips. The biggest risk with these is probably infant mortality. Beyond that, they should soldier on a very long time. Even keys in keyboards have improved in this regard.
As far as I can tell, even simple appliances like clock radios have gotten far better over the years, after they got rid of most of the mechanical components, including the scratchy sounding volume control pots, never mind the fault-prone vacuum tubes and all the heat-related stress they caused, before the solid state era.
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elizabethsimon
9/23/2011 6:08 PM EDT
Several years ago I purchased a high end oven with microchip control. After about 9 months, I got an error display. Still under Warrantee so I called the local repair tech who came out and replaced a board. 6 months later same problem. About 3 year later after several iterations (and extension of Warrantee due to repeated problems), I replaced the oven with a low end one with manual controls.
As nearly as I could determine, the high-end oven did not have adequate surge/spike/dropout protection so repeated powerline problems resulted in failure. It was a shame since that oven was otherwise of good quality and should have lasted 20 years or more.
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Frank Eory
9/24/2011 1:15 PM EDT
Power supplies seem to be the most common cause of failure in today's electronic products, and there's no good excuse for that. Every manufacturer feels they need to save the extra 50 cents that it would cost to use higher voltage capacitors that allow for a comfortable amount of voltage headroom.
Sometimes I take the time to open up a failed product, find those bulging electrolytic caps and replace them. But more often than not, I just throw the thing away like everyone else does and go buy a newer model.
A cynic might say the manufacturer planned it to fail after X months or years, to force customers to go buy a new product. But smart businessmen know that an unhappy customer who bought a poor quality product is a lot less likely to give that manufacturer a second chance.
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prabhakar_deosthali
9/22/2011 2:54 AM EDT
I do not agree with the view that the quality is going down or there are no processes to measure quality. In fact in today's manufacturing set up unless you are ISO certified & ROHS compliant you hardly stand a chance to sell your products in the global marketplace.
Most of the manufacturing companies do have well laid out assembly plants and well written process sheets, inspection sheets , quality control norms , pre delivery inspection procedures and post sales support .
In general the minimum expected quality of the products has improved over the last two decades.
In today's fast paced world a product's life time has got reduced naturally. As against what was made 30 years ago, no product is made to last your life-time nowadays because the customer is likely to throw it away anyway even if it was in a good working condition.
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no clever name
9/22/2011 5:01 PM EDT
Lets say a company is making a product in the USA, not a rocket science product, just some simple and well understood electronic product.
Mgt decides to take production to china and make more money
Get sample, and it is acceptable (to management) in that it works, but not as good or a long as the one we make but good enough to sell.
So we lay everyone off, sell off all the machines for pennies on the dollar, alienate the suppliers etc. No expensive employee to send to China to audit the vendor.
First lot arrives, all is good.Management pats self on back, takes huge bonus, call head hunter and start to look for next victim.
The Chinese factory decide to take out some cost, make more money and not tell customer.
They supposed to use 1MM wire and they change to .95 MM and get away with it. Since a hundred dollars savings on an order is big money over there, the temptation is huge. USA company also laid off the incoming QC, vendor audits, and engineering support because they use a ISO company. They they do not detect the problem. Vendor get away with it.
Now China vendor get bold. Decide to buy capacitors from less expensive different vendor, and they will only last a year, not 5 like the good vendor. Process repeats. Eventually. products become junk.
Since USA company no longer does any testing of any sort, they do not see until too late.
Now the USA company has massive warranty's, they have to absorb. Not possible to get money back from vendor in china.
In the end, they move to a different factory and then the process repeats. Good, then ok, then junk, then good by.
Soon the USA company is out of business. BUT the CEO and the others took out millions in salary and bonus. Then moved on before their bad decisions destroy the company.
How to fix this broken cycle is beyond me. Too much greed.
Rod
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sharps_eng
9/22/2011 6:37 PM EDT
Salesmen and engineers dumped from the old company set up new rival with shiny advanced products using new ideas they weren't allowed before.
New company carries on quality product line, captures loyal customers; old company - well it doesn't matter what it does.
New company is fine until managers retire and pass control to more money-oriented successors, cycle repeats...
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no clever name
9/22/2011 7:38 PM EDT
I am at one of those new companies.
It is much smaller, and I know a lot of good people hurt by the previous company. So I still have bad feelings .
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jackOfManyTrades
9/23/2011 4:06 AM EDT
I don't think you know what Quality is. Quality is a measure of fitness for purpose. To equate "a rugged design that were built to last a lifetime" as being a quality design implies that being rugged and lasting a lifetime are requirements, which often is not the case (and it would add significant cost to the product if they were).
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Sanjib.Acharya
9/23/2011 11:41 AM EDT
When the quality of any product is talked about, I think the cost factor automatically gets interlinked. Customers are well aware that the higher quality products cost more. But, what level of quality is needed is important to find out and who provides that at lower cost most probably wins.
Here one thing is missed out which is important at least for the electronics industry. A lower quality product might cost less initially, but might create trouble in medium to longer term. Customers face interrupted service and the supplier suffers by spending money for replacing the field-returns or debugging and fixing issues. Loosing goodwill is another factor. So I think it is important to have a balance between all these.
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Duane Benson
9/23/2011 1:24 PM EDT
"I think that many of these quality and support issues are the direct result, in a difficult economy"
I saw this trend starting way before the recession (at least before the current recession). In the case of software and hardware devices that can be remotely update, this largely started with the broad emergence of the Internet. (see the article on eeTimes about unintended consequences.) Before the Internet, it was incredibly expensive and only marginally feasible, at best, to update software post sale. That being the case, companies spent a lot more time testing and debugging prior to release.
The Internet created an easy and inexpensive way to update post sale. Once that trend started, the risk of shipping too early diminished, standards relaxed and here we are. You can't buy, install and use something new without having to wait for an update during the install or at first use.
"Community support" kind of had a similar genesis. People started it on their own. Companies saw value in it. Companies started relying on it more and more...
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Russell.Dominique
9/23/2011 5:51 PM EDT
My first TV was a Sony tube set and it lasted over 20 years with one repair (mechanical tuner replacement). My next TV was an RCA tube set and it lasted about 15 years until a lightning strike hit too close. Then I got a solid state LCD flat screen GE TV and it started failing a week ago after only 6 years for no apparent reason. I had expected that the solid state designs would beat out the tubes. My LCD computer monitors seem to go on forever. Small sample.
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Frank Eory
9/24/2011 1:32 PM EDT
Funny you should mention LCD computer monitors. In the post above where I talked about power supply failures, my immediate thought was the two 24" widescreen LCD monitors that failed on me just this month -- identical make & model, both purchased less than 4 years ago, both had blown caps in the PS within 2 weeks of each other. Otherwise they had always been perfect -- no dead pixels, no problems with the CCFL backlights, etc.
For their replacements, I decided to spend a few more bucks and buy a highly rated name-brand monitor, and upgrade from CCFL to white LED backlighting.
The old saying "you get what you pay for" is often true, and I'm hoping that in this case the name-brand manufacturer spent the extra 50 cents for better caps in the PS...
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Neo1
9/24/2011 5:10 AM EDT
Actually on average the quality has gone down. This is due to simple statistic- the number_of_quality_goods/total_good was high a decade back compared to now because the denominator has shot up. So the chances of you coming across low quality goods is high now compared to yesteryears.
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Bert22306
9/25/2011 6:33 PM EDT
Even if the statement is true, and I don't necessarily think it is, the reason you give? Hmm.
If the number of products on the market is greater now than it was 10 years ago, why would you conclude that the numerator in your equation would stay constant, and only the denominator increases?
That amounts to saying, quality has gone down because I said so. All else being equal, one would expect that as total number of products on the market goes up, so would the number of the better ones in the heap. Unless there are demonstrable reasons why this isn't the case.
And by the way, most people only talk about product longevity, as if quality only means longevity. It doesn't. The color TVs of the 1960s and 1970s were atrocious quality, compared with the ones of today, simply because their color rendition was awful (low contrast, bad color fidelity compared with the original image), they rendered colors differently for each TV station you'd tune in, their electronics drifted over time, ghost images were practically impossible to eliminate totally, and never mind the abysmal resolution.
Just lasting 20 years hardly makes up for the pitiful quality of the design. (Not to say there weren't reasons why those sets were so primitive, but primitive they definitely were.)
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another_bill
9/26/2011 10:41 AM EDT
I think that most people equate reliability with quality. It may not matter in a dog chew-toy if it falls apart in a few days or even hours, but for most of us, a car or dishwasher or oscilloscope is expected to work every time without any fuss and our perception of it's quality largely hinges on never having any problems with it. Any amount of bells and whistles in your car won't make up for one instance of sitting on the shoulder with the hood up waiting for a tow truck.
I've found that the problems I see with electronics today are frequently connector related. This wasn't a problem in electronics decades ago since everything was soldered or clamped with screws. Plug-in assembly makes manufacturing and service easy, but it impacts reliability, especially in harsh environments (your car is probably the harshest environment for electronics that you ever experience).
I agree with several comments that electrolytic capacitors are a problem, but it's not always insufficient voltage rating. I've replaced a lot of them situated too close to hot components. I'm sure the failure was thermally triggered. For what it's worth, I have a mid-fifties vintage tube portable radio that has a hot power resistor literally wrapped around an electrolytic can, so this is nothing new.
The auto industry is a good example of how the quality cycle works. American car makers made a world-class product for years, then they started cutting costs and began producing a badly inferior product. I suspect most of us who owned one of those inferior ones are not ready to trust the American automakers yet, despite a lot of evidence that they fixed the problems. When there are alternative manufacturers readily available, companies that produce bad products, even if just for a short time, lose customers permanently. How many customers did Toyota lose due to their recent, well-publicized problems?
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1Sparky
9/26/2011 6:59 PM EDT
well...a confusing world it is...Quality is not ubiquitous in usage or experiences and is different than we assumed was in the world we grew up in. I scanned through and noted a few issues/this could be a small book that would be obsolete when published and of no interest to anyone except academics and historians; but that's another lecture. My first groan came from the observation of consumer goods being, uh, less than good. My observation is that 'Quality Control' no longer exists as a department or even a job of any description in the 'consumer' markets. Testing and process improvement are barely alive and only exist for the reduction of costs. 'Bad things' and electronics of all descriptions are 'shipped' with a warranty of some kind, so that the buyer is left to report any failed product and attempt to obtain another: the cost of good quality is now External to the company and savings compared to the cost of returned goods must be positive(?) If you bought a soft-steel screwdriver assuming it was like Grampa's...welcome to the World Economy. As far as I can tell, Durable Goods are the only 'produced' products to have any sort of process improvement as some Legislation has been put in place to insure high-dollar items have some financial security to the buyer and Insurance sellers. You have to realize that the money-makers and politicians are in charge of most of the issues you identify, and while the general knowledge and appreciation of 'technological marvels' is waning, and good things can still be made(however there is no longer any incentive in most industries). But as you observe: USA has the Wal-Mart mentality and 'quality has left the building' and far as I can see, is Not coming back! sorry folks, game-over.
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Neo1
9/27/2011 12:33 AM EDT
Bert, how else do you think we have gazillion products and you expect the same ratio to hold good as in the past 2o years. Ask intel how many chips they discard for each wafer.
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Bert22306
9/27/2011 2:34 PM EDT
Simple. We also have more production capacity than we used to have decades ago, globally, and more automation in the production chain. All of which can lead to an increase in the quantity good quality products, and certainly the same ratio of good to bad, at the very least.
I just don't buy the urban legend of quality going down the tubes. It's one of those complaints a lot of people feel compelled to voice, and by the way I've been hearing it my entire life. So by now it sounds like one of those empty truisms. And it doesn't reflect reality.
Much like the myth that a particular brand of Japanese cars builds an extraordinarily high quality car. Another empty truism that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny.
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S.S..Iyer
9/28/2011 10:11 AM EDT
Wish List for a Quality Product:
Good features + fit for purpose + long life + affordable cost + safe to use + efficient performance + low operating costs + easy availability + withstand mis-use + perform in harsh environments + low maintainance + neglibible failures + good support.....
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J Kosin
9/30/2011 1:09 PM EDT
Here is a good rule of thumb I like... saw it at a repair shop once...
Cheap / Fast / Quality Job
Pick any two you want.
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J Kosin
9/30/2011 1:11 PM EDT
Management usually goes for cheap and quick....
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Navelpluis
9/30/2011 1:48 PM EDT
Don is right on with his story. Lots of products -mostly modules- that engineers use are not even finished, or they have flaws. The key for succes -in my humble opinion- is to bring stuff on the market that really is doing the job suburb. There are brands (ON-semi, National, Analog devices) who do that. Then, doing so, your company will be a winner. Unfortunately this is overshadowed by extremely quick innovation. (It is a kind of paradox) Best is not to leave your principles behind and finish your product.
When you really really analyze the past it all started with the PC e.g. Micro$oft. No one knew anything about computers those days and no one would dare to admit that the software of these days actually was one piece of garbage. (We all paid for it... Hard to admit you threw your money in the bin, right? ;-) You asked your neighbor how he solved his PC problems. On the other hand, your car and even the car radio you expect that to work in 1 time. If not, you go back. My theory here is that Mr Billy Gates really F$#%^ed up our mindset about these things. He initialized this trend. It indeed started a few decades ago.... I would suggest to all of you readers: Give this a thought.
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Camaro
9/30/2011 2:46 PM EDT
Don, you ask where the Quality is and then go to a big box store to try and find it?
That's like going to Walmart when you want to buy a Cadillac. Even if Walmart sold cars, what kind of car do you think you would find?
Good story, and I'm sure a nice guy but give your head a shake.
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WKetel
9/30/2011 10:10 PM EDT
Jack made the remark that durability and ruggedness "do not equate to quality", but that being good enough to do the job was adequate quality. That sounds like the sales people who start to list features of a product when I mention my desire for quality. Even a paper towel must not fall apart until after it has completed the task of drying my hands. A quality tool is one that not only fits correctly the first time that I use it, but still fits (or functions) correctly after I use it a few hundred times. A quality refrigerator would last 40 years, and the first part to fail would be the door gasket. Of course, it would not even have an ice maker. The quality color TV sets in the sixties did give a decent picture on all the channels with an adequate signal. It was the junk sets that had the problems. The guilty parties know who I mean. So definitely, we can say that a high quality product gives us our money's worth, while a poor quality product does not.
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seaEE
9/30/2011 11:53 PM EDT
It use to be common (I don't know if it still is) for design engineers to operate a resistor at know more than a certain percentage of its rated power. Other components were similarly derated. Practices such as these contributed to a robust design.
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Expat Canuck
10/3/2011 1:56 PM EDT
Speaking from an inside software development perspective, I've seen the pressure to meet a nonsensical deadline. The result was a piece of software that had kludge, patch and fix upon yet more kludges and patches piled on until the product creaked to life. There was literally no time to investigate the design issues that we faced as the sales people over-ruled the engineers every time we wanted to correct a fundamental flaw in the design. The standard response was always, "Can you patch it?" This situation was by no means unique, as I've seen it in military contractors, aviation, communications and commercial products companies.
One company threatened our CEO by telling him that unless the problems were fixed, they would rip out our boxes and dump them into the nearest landfill. How's that for building the company's reputation for quality?
The software we were forced to deliver was highly coupled, badly designed, buggy and brittle. Requests by customers for even small changes were a nightmare to implement and get right. Of course when the product failed, as it often did we were chastised on the quality of our processes. Any attempt to bring realism to the discussion of schedules was met with the retort, "... but you agreed to the schedule in the first place." Of course the threat was always that if you can't do the job then we will get someone in who can.
If this sounds a tad cynical it was meant to be as I don't see anyone, save the Japanese companies, attempting to change the status quo.
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pmalta
11/2/2011 11:12 AM EDT
Don
Very good your article. I took the "liberty" to translate it to portuguese to sahre it with other coleagues in Brazil that don't read well in english.
A long time I didn't see an objective article about the rising low-quality of products and services and the acceptance of ordinary people on it.
I think is in our hands to bring quality back.
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dbaechtel
11/20/2011 12:30 PM EST
Muito Obrigada pela vossa ajuda. Desejo-vos prosperidade.
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dbaechtel
11/20/2011 12:26 PM EST
THANKS very much for your effort to translate this for the Brazillians. Too bad that I didn't get much response on my ideas to help improve the situation.
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