Some thoughts from the field on the causes of contract manufacturing defects. Not trying to be narcissistic, just hoping to contribute to the community in some way.
197 karma · joined November 10, 2011
(1) Sorry for the bugs -- misconfigured subscribe tool has been removed and you can use http to access the site as there is an issue with the https config on the new landing page
(2) Graphs have the axes explained in the text. Removing them from the figures was recommended as a marketing hack, but very ill-advised. I'll get the figures updated within the next half-hour or so
(3) Advertisement? Sure. But... also a huge dataset and an interesting finding about the relative perceptions. It's not a scientific journal article by any means (I've written some), but it does outline how the data was put together. If anyone is interested in collaborating on a deeper study, I'm very happy to do so!
We think GetScale works great for anything that:
(1) Is valuable enough to warrant a serial number (unique ID)
(2) Has unit margin of at least a few dollars
(3) Is complicated to build or inspect, or has to be held to an extremely high aesthetic standard (e.g. luxury goods)
That covers almost all of your examples. One counter-example might be T-shirt manufacturing.
You are describing a type of machine called an AOI (automated optical inspection). It is a common piece of equipment in electronics assembly lines. But AOI equipment is very expensive (~$250k+) and only works on a specific set of products. For example, it doesn't work well when the product contains soft or flexible surfaces, or has a highly non-planar shape.
GetScale terminals can be interfaced with AOI machines in the factory to collect and store the findings along with our human-led inspections and catalog everything by serial number and we do have ambitions to add AOI-like capabilities to our hardware down the line.
Sounds like you have a project in mind. What are you working on? ;-)
You're right in that if the factory wants to misbehave and the owner/GM is a tyrant, you aren't likely to directly impact worker treatment (we have in-house auditors in China that can check on the factory for you if you have that specific concern). Fortunately, the overwhelming number of factory owners/GM's are fundamentally decent people caught up in difficult circumstances.
Typical contracts are structured 30% deposit and 70% when it ships. Margins to the factory aren't 70% so they wind up quite leveraged. Most of the scenarios I saw came out of the factory not understanding or executing on the customer requirements correctly. If they build units and the customer rejects them, they have to cover those material costs so they can repair or otherwise try again. This tremendous financial pressure causes otherwise good GM's to cut corners every possible way they can to try to keep the lights on.
GetScale impacts worker treatment in several ways:
(1) it eliminates waste and errors that result from misunderstandings in customer acceptance procedures. After deploying us in a factory you just don't encounter thousands of bad units because the factory is confirming against the exact acceptance procedure as you go (instead of build a lot, ship, customer receives and rejects).
(2) it is possible to audit your suppliers and if you do that, GetScale provides the ground truth of which workers were working at which stations when and for how long (down to the millisecond!). Since you have to login-logout to do any work our records are very accurate.
(3) it enables you to vote with your dollars. Without invasive monitoring (like GetScale) it is very difficult to determine which factories are "good" because reputation is easy to coopt and places like Alibaba can be bought. GetScale data collection is automatic and the data is held off-shore (in the US). We already see factories in China using GetScale as a selling point to foreign clients since it provides quantitative proof of their compliance and performance. A factory that is willing to be open about its performance and let you document workers on the line is the factory proud of its worker treatment, not the one trying to hide it.
As to studies, I have seen some in both the psychology of management literature and the manufacturing management literature, but as to specific citations I will need some time to dig them out of my research notes.
In any case, I hope I've answered your concerns. If I missed anything, please follow-up!
Perhaps this will help until then: (1) You can click anywhere that isn't the splash screen (any dark area) to dismiss it. (2) You can jump straight to parts by URL https://circuithub.com/parts or (3) by the big button on the splash screen in the lower right.