Quality crisis in electronics industry-survey

11/17/2011 3:32 PM EST

This topic again.

Excuse me, but is there anything more (mindless)cliché than the dictum, "They don't build them like they used to"? It might roll off the tongue easily enough, but that doesn't make it true.

I, for one, do not want to go back to the bad old days of drift-prone tubed electronics, analog AM radio, NTSC TV, or just about any electronic products from the past. Nor would I want to go back to the cars of the 1950s, 60s, 70s, or even 80s.

Many years ago, an auto mechanic said to me, "People always say 'they don't build them like they used to.' It's true," he said, "they build them much better."

Clever fellow.

11/17/2011 7:08 PM EST

I'd take issue with you there Bert. I appreciate that all the things you have cited have progressed a lot - technically - from those of yesteryear. But they are built smarter, not necessarily better. A lot of the products you cite would work for 20,30 even 50 years without missing a beat. These days we're lucky if things work for 5 or 10 years without breaking down.

Not that you'd want a 10-year old cellphone. The technology is progressing so fast that just about anyone would want something better. But there is a range of cell phones and modems here that has a name for lasting 6 months to a year and then breaking, and it seems you just chuck 'em.

There's a happy medium somewhere, involving quality of production and also recycleability. The throwaway lifestyle we are used to is not infinitely sustainable and we need to pay more attention to what we do with things that are no longer needed.

11/17/2011 8:52 PM EST

Bert, hi... I don't see it as a "good old days" syndrome at all. I see it more as a persistent process issue that probably spans generations. Lousy quality has no doubt been with us forever, but why haven't we come to some general agreement on quality best practices (not just among those who want ISO 9000 awards and Deming plaudits)??

But separately, the issue of quality in electronics components is hugely important, if for nothing else than safety. Increasing system complexity should mean that components are rock-solid quality, but apparently that's not the case.

11/17/2011 9:12 PM EST

oh good grief history always get rose tinted glasses
does nobody remember
1)early microwave ovens
2)chevy engines from the 40s and 50s
3)dodge engines period
4)ford electronics
5)eveything from detroit from 1970 through 2000

there is a big quality problem whenever there is a rapid change in technology

they don't make things like they used to, there is not enough steel to do that

the good thing is with communication I can usually avoid problem products
1 wait for reviews, don't wait in line for the first one
2 decide what you need, find or wait for a good solution
3 if it doesn't exist and you can't wait build it

11/18/2011 11:32 AM EST

I guess I'm one of the lucky ones.

Since I do RF power amp designs I mainly deal with companies like Freescale and Polyfet and find excellent quality and excellent customer support.

I do have other engineers at work who do analog and receiver designs and I know they have some problems in their specific arenas.

11/18/2011 2:33 PM EST

ha.. this is almost funny. I went through the era of "quality is free", deming classes, TQM, SiX Sigma, ISO9000...etc.. then the industry was taken over by finance and operations people who gave our best manufacturing and product technology to China to "meet the quarter" now we have disposable stuff from china with quality issues and they steal the IP at the same time - is anyone surprised?

11/18/2011 3:00 PM EST

I will second Kevin's comment, but add that the use of counterfeit components (ones that really are marked and packaged to look like what they are being used to cheaply, in all senses of the word, replace) is a new phenomenon that was not seen until China. Before China we always had the manufacturing group that tried to substitute a cheaper component into the BOM, but now have absolutely no control or traceability on our designs manufactured there. In the past couple of years on my projects I have seen OpAmp relaxation oscillators that did not oscillate, exploding ceramic capacitors, and numerous other less than shining examples of circuits designed and built in the US that always worked, then sent over to China and never worked when built there. I for one will not buy food or cooking equipment that is manufactured there due to my real concerns with materials substitution and introduction of unknowns when the specified materials are short. This has made replacing my good US made cookware and tools pretty tough lately, and for lots of extra time inspecting the seafood pacakages.

11/18/2011 3:00 PM EST

Complicated issue. Sometimes what works best is what is "Good Enough" for the "Right Price". Case in point, if you buy a higher priced Cordless drill that might last you 10 years, but the battery pack is worthless in 4 years, and the cost of a new battery pack is 3/5 of a new drill. Does it make sense to buy the more expensive drill and then later a new battery pack or a cheaper drill initially and then to get the new drill (which may be a higher voltage, have more torque, have a new warranty,etc...).
We are right to want to build a good product (and consumers are right to want a good product). The question is, how good is good enough and at what price ?

11/18/2011 3:03 PM EST

Although I would like to produce a perfect design in both function and quality, I have accepted that even my own requirements are not "frozen"(never happens, does it?)long enough for this dream to be realized.

So, for me, quality is just another variable in the equation - not an absolute. This axiom is rolled up in a poster that I saw on a machinist's office door: "Cheap,Fast, or Good - pick any two of these that you want!"

Now, before you say "I hope this guy is not designing pace makers", I think that most of us (including me) will lean more towards "Good" than cheap and fast. Perhaps that's why we see a Quality Crisis?????

11/18/2011 4:31 PM EST

Who runs the company? Bean counters or the Engineers? The engineer, my vote - would put forth a better product if given the time....Bean Counter - Time to Market takes precedence. Can you say "Sales commission check"? This will repeat until one entity says enough is enough - The Customer.

11/18/2011 6:23 PM EST

Come back Bill & Dave, all is forgiven....

11/19/2011 11:47 AM EST

I think we had a similar discussion on the topic of degrading quality, may be a month or a couple of months back. If I recall correctly, majority of the readers agreed that they thought that there was a trend of degraded quality and that was mostly because the management were not allowing enough time due to market pressure. The result of this survey described in this article supports the same.
How to fix it?...tough question. At this moment I can only think of a way, which could be to enforce certain norms for mandatory quality requirements internationally for categories of products…but difficult thing to do. Again, the question can be raised whether we need a phone that would be functional for next 10 years? I think we will change our electronic gadgets every 3-4 years, if not earlier, because of the new things coming so fast. But for a phone, the quality norms might enforce health and safety requirements for user at the minimum.

11/19/2011 4:49 PM EST

It comes back to the old adage, "you get what you pay for." In consumer electronics, most customers, including the end consumer, are not willing to pay extra for high quality or reliability. If X additional BOM cost would extend the product life by Y years, but lifetime revenues for the product would be reduced due to lower market share and lower total sales, then a prudent business manager would be foolish to agree to spend an extra X dollars on BOM cost.

Most companies draw the line at safety issues. They do not buy exploding lithium ion battery packs just to save a few cents per unit -- for the same reason that food distributors don't buy milk that has been diluted and tainted with an industrial protein in an attempt to cheat the quality test.

Causing your customers to replace products more frequently due to poor quality is one thing. Harming them is quite another. But again, in the end it comes down to "you get what you pay for." Most consumers are willing to pay for freedom from harm -- not as many are willing to pay for longevity of performance.

11/19/2011 5:02 PM EST

Good points above; but what really upsets me is when product quality is sub-par right off the bat, and I think we, firmware developers, are partly at fault here as well. The bean-counter and "Time to Market is King" attitude of management is a drag for sure; but would everything be perfect, if we were given a Groundhog Day chance to get things right? When Jean Labrosse, the creator of uC/OS, wrote an article after this year's ESC about his coding convention, he was literally ridiculed for liking his comment-closing star-slashes right-justified (hey, are all the ISO-9001 requirements any more justified, no pun intended...? :-) ), while completely disregarding his excellent point about the importance of proper code documentation. The "preamble" preceding every function, providing 1-sentence pithy descriptions of the function's purpose, the input parameters and the return value, is the most obvious and effective way to improve code quality, IMHO; and yet, is it being done religiously? I don't think so! Within the first week of their existence, these preambles save more time than it took to create them, even if a single developer is working on the code. You will be surprised how many times I recognized inefficiencies, under-specification and flat-out logic flaws in my design, just because I forced myself to write down the above info verbally before churning out the code like a snow cannon.

Of course the flip side of the coin is the self-interest in producing obfuscated code. While I don't believe for a minute that it really means job security [management, if they have even the slightest spark of insight, should get rid of the notorious trash-coders], I can really see how people (completely unknowingly) form an impression that because a code is simple, clean and reads like a book, it must have been very easy to develop as well. I would still argue, however, that proper coding habits are a win-win-win situation, and are in the best interest of everybody.

11/20/2011 6:16 AM EST

i think quality is inverse proportional to NRE cost. ASICs or complex digital chips are usually of excellent quality nowadays as you can get them to work (and prevent a 2nd turn) only with rigorous measures. on the other end of the scale, software/firmware updates delivered via the web tend to cause poor quality. ultimately that is also the difference in thinking between hardware engineers and (many) software engineers.

11/20/2011 6:25 PM EST

I'm still not buying the majority of this. One problem I have is that many people seem to be thinking only in terms of the quality of little hand-held gizmos, like smart phones or perhaps tablets, that are (a) never meant to be long lasting products, and (b) comparable to similar low quality and short-lived stuff from the past, like the boom boxes, portable cassette players, or portable record players of the 1960s and 1970s. Cheap stuff. "Who cares" stuff.

On the other hand, back in the days of tubed electronics, it was entirely commonplace to have to get your TV, radio, or stereo in for repairs. The problems were most often caused by burned out tube filaments and other components failing for heat stress. So it wasn't always just a matter of changing a tube. Not to mention, the quality of passive components, e.g. electrolytic capacitors, was quite poor. Power supply filter caps were notorious for failing (creating that roaring sound). And even more prevalent, the performance of most of these electronic products deteriorated gradually but very significantly, over their normal life spans.

How many times have we had to deal with any of those problems lately? Radios, TVs, and the better audio systems (i.e. maybe not the boom box equivalent cheap mini-stereos) last a very long time, with no visits to any repair shops. And they are technically a whole lot better than they were in the past besides. What usually gives up first is the switch gear, and even that has gotten much better lately. For instance, mechanical volume control pots, that often became scratchy in short order, have been replaced by electronic contols. Mechanical tuning caps, that also became noisy, and the circuit was badly drift-prone besides, was replaced with digital synthesized tuning circuits. Huge improvements, not only in stable performance, but also in longevity.

"They don't build them like they used to." Thank goodness for that! They make them a lot better.

11/21/2011 5:49 AM EST

Its very difficult to incorporate Quality becuase not many Engineers wants to do documentation, Unless it get driven strongly from top management in the Organization, its impossible to drive this. The Non conformance needs to be taken seriously and actually its not too much of a burden if the Engineering documents are aligned to QMS. But I agree if you want to deliver consistent results, successively adhering to QMS is a must.

11/21/2011 7:47 AM EST

All the new products designed are looked for low weight. Naturally the strength of these unexpectedly goes below the designed levels in the field. The failures take place. There comes the learning curve for every component makers and system builders. This will slowly pick up but by the time further reduction of weight leads to the similar issues. A contentment on the weight of the product will give more success stories.

11/22/2011 4:25 PM EST

This thread reminds me of an earlier thread in which I commented on my two 24" widescreen LCD monitors that were purchased at the same time, lasted almost 3 years, and died within weeks of each other in the same manner -- a power supply failure. Most likely a ruptured electrolytic capacitor, but I didn't bother to open them up to confirm if that was the cause, because it just wasn't worth my time -- I had no intention of repairing them anyway.

The monitors were cheap when I bought them, I got a lot of use out of them, and I was ready for something better -- LED backlighting, faster LCD response time, HDMI input, etc.

Sometimes we are actually sort of ok with gadgets that don't have a longer service life, because we want something newer and better (better, at least in terms of features and performance), but we are reluctant to replace a gadget that still works. When it fails, it can be almost a welcome event -- now we have a good excuse to go out and get that newer model we would rather have anyway.

Extreme consumerism? Perhaps. Those two dead monitors are still hanging around, waiting for me to take them to the recycling center, which I definitely WILL do. Environmentally conscious extreme consumerism :)

11/23/2011 10:19 AM EST

It is true that so many things, particularly electronic, are much better now.
It is also true that things in the past were far less complex. Since reliability is inversely related to complexity it makes sense that simpler things could be reliable even with old technology components. A radio with only 5 active elements (tubes) can be fairly reliable, especially if you replace the tubes when they die. I have a 1941 Plymouth automobile. The schematic for the car fits on a half a letter sized piece of paper. There are no electronic modules to fail. It does not have all the features of a modern car (radio, cruise control, intermittent wipers, ABS, AC, turn signals, back up light, automatic transmission, power windows, power brakes, power locks, emissions controls, etc.) So these things can't fail. Debugging a very simple device is easy. Even though the parts in this car are 70 years old, I have always been able to debug and fix any problem even when things fail on the road. Try doing that with a modern car that might have dozens of microprocessors. Modern cars always need to be towed to a place that has the proprietary tools needed to debug them.

11/23/2011 2:00 PM EST

Punt, Pass and Kick, fundamentals of quality rules are like given laws of physics and do not change dramatically. But working at various companies it is interesting quality is a cyclic event. We decide to lay-off a bunch of resources, including quality, then when the customer is upset, warranty returns escalate, or scrap is out of control then we jump back on the quality band-wagon. Working in the consulting field is a gold mind, because you just need to find a faltering company and teach them what they once knew, but package it as innovation.

11/24/2011 5:14 PM EST

I think in modern world quality is just an extra burden...if the product breaks after x years it is better from revenue point of view, the customer has to buy a new one...you just need to design a warranty period accordingly! Kris

11/25/2011 10:20 AM EST

An apparently ongoing issue:

Capacitor plague

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

11/25/2011 6:41 PM EST

When PC gets too slow or doesn't want to connect to Internet my wife says to me "the computer is broken again!!!"...she doesn't care whether this is a hardware of software problems, in fact she would not be able to tell (sorry honey)...I believe she represents 90% of users...so yes modern day gadgets are complex but frequently unreliable and perceived as low quality...that is also why Apple's model is successful, it just works! Kris

11/27/2011 5:33 AM EST

Some random remarks.
I used to enjoy fixing things - it was what I wanted to do. Then as they became more complex I became fed up with trying to do so with poor or missing documentation. Which is why I then spent 25 years as a technical author. And for the last 10 I was a quality manager as well. A very successful one. I have to admit that nature's model is entirely 'Make lots, throw them away, and try to make a slightly better one each time'. But if it can't be fixed it should at least last a reasonable time. I am not amused by products that fail one day after the expiry of the one-year warranty and I will never, ever, buy enything from LG again.
Quality starts and ends as a mind set. You need documented processes and can't have quality without them but of themselves they can do nothing. The word we use is unfortunate; it gets confused with the best possible by any standard. Not so. You set standards and meet them. They should result in value for money - difficult to define but basically if buying a new one every year is no more expensive than paying 20 times as much for one that lasts 20 years they are of equal cost. Factor in innovation and improvements; discount for probale declining reliability and performance in an ageing model and cheap and cheerful begins to look like really good value.
I do find it stupid that a number of items that come from China - or Hong Kong - have ridiculous user documentation. It's usually possible to find out how to operate them by trial and error but it often seems that they might work a lot better if one knew exactly what the designer intended. But presumably the cost of properly translating and checking the instructions is not deemed worthwhile in terms of potential sales.
The harsh truth is 'If you can sell enough of them, they're good enough'.

11/27/2011 12:36 PM EST

The debate above reminds me of the analysis of Quality as a concept in the book, " Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance." I think consumers do not lay much emphasis on what we understand as "quality" anymore. Resulting in the fact that, the manufacturers intentionally lower the quality to cut costs so they can sell it to a bigger market. For the few 1 or 2% who get really pissed off about the quality- the companies do not care about them, as they make poor repeat customers anyway.

11/27/2011 6:11 PM EST

The internet has the effect of flattening markets so that there is less diversity of price - of course the price has to be low to get sales but with consumers using the web, if the price is a little high it gets very very few sales and becomes non-viable. The difference between viable and non-viable forms a knee in the sale price/sale volume curve, and that knee is getting sharper and sharper. I think there are few companies that can successfully explain how their higher-price goods are justified, they mostly won't get a 2nd chance to explain. Apple never talks about price - they just pretend that no-one else exists in the market and why wouldn't you want the best product anyway? (Yes I have a Mac now, haven't touched my PC for months except for specific engineering tasks). Finally, @silicon_smith I agree about ZAMM, it made the point that many people simply have NO IDEA what an engineer is talking about when he talks about 'Quality'. If people don't have the words to describe something they can't communicate it; so engineers have the DUTY to educate the 'unseeing' about the principles of Quality and what difference it makes. If you can't communicate that, perhaps it doesn't matter, like pastels to a colour-blind person, maybe 'Quality' is simply out-of-band to most people? I fear it is a luxury appreciated by few. However it is possible to test for it, and only hire those who demonstrate the ability to perceive it. It seems a reasonably test to make when hiring.

11/28/2011 9:01 PM EST

Today's management focus on ROI and Time to Market. Outsourcing becomes inevitable. One of the challenges of outsourcing is quality control. I am sure a lot of companies have experienced quality issue at the earlier stage. Frustration will surely come after. Given the requirement of time to market, engineering gets less time in development and QA. Since QA is the final stage, it will typically suffer the most. Here comes a -ve spiral. Quality will never be the same. However, the product life cycle has been reduced dramatically. Nowadays, I have seen people swapping their mobile phone every 2 years if not every year. With this consideration, there is really less incentive for company to build a product that lasts for 8-10 years. I guess it is a supply and demand problem again. If we, as a consumer, demand a high quality long lasting product, I am sure different brand will start building product that lasts.

11/29/2011 11:24 AM EST

All of the posts have some truth.

I am sure we have all experienced the good and the bad in consumer product quality. The good is that products don't fail in the manner they used to 30 years ago. But they fail in new ways due to shaving a few cents off of each item to increase profits. The bad is that documentation and tech support are terrible for the most part.

Do the companies consider how much they would save in support costs by building a little bit of quality at the front. Ever hear of Systems Engineering?

Ever heard the term "planned obsolescence"? We can make them last but we don't because of the short term profit mentality.

Products today don't last as long. Is it due to complexity or lower quality parts? I believe it is due to not giving engineers the time to design the products properly.

Ask your mother about the washing machine and stoves that lasted 30 years. We just replaced a top of the line washer that lasted 13 years and the salesman told us we were lucky. The installer told us the new one won't last more than 4 or 5 years.

By the way, the new washing machine sends feedback through the AC power line affecting my multimedia system. Never had this problem with the 13 year old washer! Poor design!

Regards

12/1/2011 11:59 PM EST

I think we might also consider that electronic devices are much more widespread and integrated into our lives than they were even 10 years ago. We can complain about microwaves that break down now, when 20 years ago, very few people had one to break down.
There's much to be said for the bean counter proposition as the cause as well, because of the prevalence of pirated components that have not been properly vetted (http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-37352).

12/7/2011 6:33 PM EST

Reliability and repairability. This can be downright spooky when vital systems are concerned. The LORAN navigation system is a good examole. It was developed during and used in WWII and was antiquated before GPS was available. This equipment was designed to be reliable and to be serviced.
The problem was that during the 1980's there was only one man to maintain the LORAN system for the Gulf of Mexico. Vital spare parts had been unavailable for years but the cannibal warehouse was open.
Equipment price and overall quality were not issues. The technical side of maintenance was not an issue. The equipment was designed to be serviced. Parts availability, under-staffing and a make-do attitude were problms that were only resolved through the development of an entirely new technology.
Now, anyone with the proper charts and a relatively cheap, highly reliable GPS unit can navigate in the Gulf of Mexico and almost anywhere else in the world.
I am very grateful that "they don't build 'em like they used to". I don't want one of "them" at all.

1/11/2012 6:52 AM EST

I think there are things that are being made much better, and others that are being made worse I won't list the many item I own that fit in these 2 categories, but one thing I will cover is cars which by and large are much more reliable in the first 5-10 years if properly serviced, than they used to be BUT while an old car could be kept going for 40 to 60 years I think the new ones probably have 10% of their parts not replaceable after 15. There are even some Korean models where parts aren't available after 3 years. The biggest problem with the items that have become less reliable is due to their design in China etc. I have no doubt that the Chinese etc. will get to where the Japanese are now, but for the moment the only quality products they make are those outsourced by larger and more reputable companies such as Apple, because they tightly control the manufacturing and design process.