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From: Ron Rogers (no email)
Date: Tue Jul 01 2003 - 00:46:48 EDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Donohue" <>
<SNIP>
For the conventional manufacturer this is not all a good thing. While he
would like to minimize infant mortality that would impact warranty costs he
is not interesting in reducing failures after the warranty period. So
unless he can get a warranty payback he is not interested. Given limited
production runs he may even decide to take the warranty hits as cheaper than
the cost of functional test...any he may be correct in the straight
economics.
<BIG SNIP>
RON OFFERS -
First a big thank you to Jim for his extraordinary insights and taking the
time to clearly explain reliability issues from the manufacturer's point of
view. Xerox's relatively unique business model highlights these decisions.
The part that I snipped out above, really explains where the fire and forget
manufacturer's motivations lie. Once MBAs and accountants indirectly or
directly control production, there is little chance that quality for
quality's sake can survive. Still, we do have Japanese cars, some
manufactured here in the USA, that are high quality. And we now see a trend
towards unreliability in Mercedes Benz (according to Consumers Report.) I
think Jim's dissertation can explain some of this.
When you have old-line manufacturers who pride themselves on quality or
where a culture may require quality, the wise consumer has a better chance
at reliability and performance. Sometimes, we pleasure boaters find
ourselves in circumstances where we must rely upon radar and our GPS. On
those relatively rare occasions, we expect (not hope) our gear to work.
There may only be two people on board when this happens, but those are human
lives after all.
It would appear that the aviation industry has attempted to insure
reliability through redundancy. Don't the big airliners have triple
redundancy on some systems? After all, on some of these big planes we are
down to two engines! The military gets this redundancy via another
requirement - survival in a hostile environment where airplanes, tanks, and
ships are expected to receive battle damage and continue to function.
Jim and Arild opened my eyes to something that I thought was uniquely
European with the exception of Intel. That is running one production line
and then sorting production by part or assembly performance. The first time
I encountered this was British Eley match ammunition. I think they had three
grades and two production lines. The German manufacturer Heckler & Koch
selected sniper rifles from one assembly line based on performance. In the
USA, we still tend to custom build sniper weapons in the military and eschew
assembly line selection. Intel rates the GHz of their CPUs based upon
performance selection from the same assembly lines.
Outside of infant mortality, we don't have much of a chance of insuring
performance. Over time, our marketplace society is based upon voting with
our pocketbooks. On the rare occasions when we buy a new yacht and it comes
with a great electronics package at a great price, perhaps we should tell
them to shove the package of we have learned that the product line or brand
is unreliable. We should vote with our feet. If we get caught with a bad
product we should scream like heck! Most people do not do that.
Ron Rogers
Annapolis, MD
_/)
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