-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- smt007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueIPC APEX EXPO 2024 Pre-show
This month’s issue devotes its pages to a comprehensive preview of the IPC APEX EXPO 2024 event. Whether your role is technical or business, if you're new-to-the-industry or seasoned veteran, you'll find value throughout this program.
Boost Your Sales
Every part of your business can be evaluated as a process, including your sales funnel. Optimizing your selling process requires a coordinated effort between marketing and sales. In this issue, industry experts in marketing and sales offer their best advice on how to boost your sales efforts.
The Cost of Rework
In this issue, we investigate rework's current state of the art. What are the root causes and how are they resolved? What is the financial impact of rework, and is it possible to eliminate it entirely without sacrificing your yields?
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - smt007 Magazine
The Essential Pioneer's Survival Guide: Is Your Brand Worth Protecting?
January 10, 2013 |Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the October 2012 issue of SMT Magazine.For most companies, the brand name represents one of a company’s most important assets. It must be protected, more or less, at all cost. A new and severe threat to technology product brands exists today--the effect of wide, immediate, and uncontrollable communication through social networking and end-user product reviews on the Internet. This represents a very severe risk to any brand, the company, and their products. The risk cannot be controlled, so a company has no other choice than to take a new approach to find and neutralize the trigger, the origins of customer dissatisfaction: Poor quality. Quality in the Marketplace
Subjective reaction to the product function in the market is one thing; everyone has a different opinion and expectations from a product. Subjective comments are easily countered with brand appeal. We all know that some people have no taste. Potential purchasers are not significantly affected by these kinds of comments.
When a purchased product fails in the market soon after delivery, however, it brings a consistent response, that of disappointment. Today, this disappointment can be vented in front of a large part of the product’s potential market. Early market quality defects can no longer be tolerated. This is not a new story, but now, it’s serious.
Product manufacturers need to face the reality about what needs to be done to avoid significant potential losses. Seemingly “one-off” defects have been a fact of life for many years. Quality has improved significantly, but what can be done to reach the point where we are in full control of our market quality?
End-customers seek information when they consider what products to buy. This is especially the case of the infrequent purchase of high-cost items, technology-based products where there are many features to compare, and of fashionable products for people who hate to be seen with last year’s models or concepts.
Figure 1: Consumers seek information when making buying decisions. Websites, such as cnet.com, have a huge set of user reviews.
Put yourself in Apple’s position, No. 1 overall in the rankingthebrands.com tables. How much money needs to be invested daily in the defense, maintenance, and growth of the Apple brand? Apple may have achieved a status today where people will often go directly to the Apple website to make a purchase and simply select which model they want in a nicely controlled environment.
This is the “promised land” of Internet sales, driven by the strength of the brand. The reality for pretty much the rest of the market is that Internet shoppers will first go to their favorite sites or use a search tool such as Google Shopping. TMI!
The first problem, then, is that there is too much information. Higher-profile brands score highly here as a focus to draw people’s attention to the company’s products, representing a degree of design excellence, performance, and features inherent with the brand image. When a suitable product is found within the brand portfolio, the shopper will likely make a quick move to the comparison websites to find the best prices for that product.
Alternatives frequently pop up at this point, similar products from other companies. This is again where the brand is important. A competitor’s lower-priced product with similar features can be a temptation. The selection decision is based on the physical appeal, specification, price, and the brand. In many situations, the strong brand can be the deciding factor, even where there is a significant price difference. Products with a weak brand or no real brand may be perceived as being less fashionable, inferior or of poorer quality.
Searching by brand and product names, search engines have a wonderful habit of returning much more than just the simple information supplied about the product. Reviews and comments are also likely. Shopping sites are even promoting these, as good product reviews rub off as being good shopping site reviews. It helps their business. There are plenty of “good products” so the cost of a poor review can be tolerated in the interests of openness and fairness. Apart from the removal of offensive language, there is little or no control of personal review content. Social Networking Issues Comments found on social media have a much more personal effect. A story is found, for example, of a child receiving a gift from their father, a new cell phone. The excited child rips apart the packaging, enjoying their new purchase experience, finds the phone, turns it on and expects it to work. Unfortunately, this phone does not work.
Devastated child; embarrassed father. In the past, this would result in the father having to make a quick trip back to the store to get a replacement. Today, the phone was more likely to have been ordered from an Internet store. The faulty unit has to be packed up, taken to a post office, and returned by mail. After some diagnostics, a new product will be shipped. This can take days or even weeks. Facing this, the child is now in meltdown.
Today’s social media provides an excellent opportunity for the child, and also the father, to let off steam. The whole experience is expressed in words of no more than four letters. The damage is done, it’s out there. Anyone coming across this “testimony” will perceive that the same thing could happen to them. A trusted brand? The next input into the search engine is product name, brand name, and the word “defect.”
It gets worse. Today, stories can be constructed just looking at the Internet. Pick up these experiences on top branded products, put them together, add a little drama, sensationalize, and out comes an article that everyone wants to read. The stories go round and round, as it in turn is used as someone else’s “research.” Suddenly, Google finds many pages of stories of defects, all related to the brand, the product, in front of the whole potential market. The brand name and the power behind it can take years to build and millions of dollars to promote. It can be seriously damaged by the simplest of defects on a very small quantity of units.
Since the seriousness of the problem, when it happens, is very high, the only thing that can be done is to reduce the risk at the source. The source is the cause of the defects in the market. Many different causes and types of defects occur in the market. The use of more advanced test procedures and processes within manufacturing has certainly yielded continuous significant improvements in market quality. They will never be the answer for brand protection. Test processes are simply filters that test addressable parameters, optically, electrically, or functionally within a set window of time. This acts as a filter to catch a certain percentage of defects, never 100%, unless you want to perform a burn-in test of the complete functionality of every single product produced. Only the rarest and most expensive of technology-based products in the market can attract such an extravagance. There needs to be another way. Finding Defects Before They Become ProblemsOver many years individuals have discussed “active quality management,” “in-line quality management,” and other such terms. These are used to differentiate the simple filter and reporting approach from the notion of finding quality issues as manufacturing is executed. There are advantages and challenges of each.
Many say that the value of a report is only to show what is already lost, and so it is better to find and resolve issues as they happen so as to improve quality continuously. Actually, it is only the perceived quality that is improving, and, since issues are being fixed continuously, most of them are not reported, remembered, or made visible. The same issues then come up over and over again. At least the visibility of the test and report approach enables a post-mortem which can help reduce future occurrences.
To find a real answer, we have to look at the nature of defects themselves. The causes can come from a number of sources and be different in nature, each requiring a different approach. The immediate thoughts are defects caused by variances in the manufacturing or assembly process. These can often be “epidemic” faults, where the same issue happens on every product. These can usually be quickly fixed if found during a test or inspection process. There can be a high cost, however, if it has taken some time to be found. There is the risk of the defect management to ensure that none of the affected units made it out of the door.
Conformance to procedures is the key, with traceability of materials and processes to be able to quickly identify the scope of products which may have the defects and also the control to ensure that no defective product is missed. The post-mortem can then find out what can be done through design changes or engineering changes in manufacturing to avoid such kinds of mistakes in the future.
Epidemic defects may also be caused by a bad batch of materials. These are a little more difficult to discover, since not all materials may yield an error. Traceability of materials is again a key issue to be able to identify products at high risk of defect, so that they can be managed and re-worked appropriately. Feedback to the supplier is a key instrument to find accountability. It is a tricky area though, since the functional failures can also be caused by a poor choice application of device; that is, using materials close to or beyond their performance capabilities. The statistics and analysis of where the issues happen, and equally importantly, where they do not happen, is essential to discover the real responsibility and solution.
There are then the “one-off” defects. These are caused mostly by a combination of different issues that may come from different sources--the path of the unlucky product. For example, the PCB assembly enters the screen printer. The paste is a little uneven since the machine just had a cleaning cycle, in itself not an issue. The next process however was to place an SMT chip on the thicker paste. This chip, though, was not the original part number. It was an alternate, approved by engineering.
Although a little shorter than the normal component, it was, however, within the tolerance of the machine. The board then went into the reflow oven which at the time was at the high end of its temperature profile. The SMD chip “floats” out of position, but just maintains contact. The board passes electrical test. This particular chip is then obscured by a larger component placed above it. It passes optical inspection. It just happens that this chip is part of a rarely used circuit, the functionality of which is not tested, that is until it gets to the customer where the fragile connection breaks under use.
There are countless examples of such one-off defects in the market, where the traditional checks of all design, materials, and manufacturing parameters had been passed. This pushes the demands of traceability and business intelligence reporting to the extreme. If you have all of the materials and process traceability data about each individual product, it can be possible to find out the unique set of circumstances that have led to the defect. It can then be possible to modify the engineering, manufacturing, or test processes, even the design layout, to avoid such cases in the future. It can also be possible to detect and avoid such patterns happening during the course of production.
Figure 2: Traceability is essential for quickly identifying manufacturing errors and solving the problem quickly. Protecting Your Brand The story is simple. The solution to brand protection is a step change in the approach to quality. This step change approach is possible through the correct and complete application of traceability, together with visibility, and applied to the whole of the product life cycle, from design, manufacturing, and assembly preparation, through execution and test. It sounds expensive, though the costs can be quite reasonable by selecting software that integrates into the operation bringing operational improvements and benefits at the same time as collecting the traceability information itself. This is, however, small change as compared to the potential damage to a business that the loss of brand confidence can bring. Thinking that such damage will never happen to you and your brand is a gamble against time and statistics. This risk of business in the Internet age cannot and should not be ignored. It is time to adopt the top-down management approach. It is time to set the expectation to the manufacturing operation and put brand quality into its rightful perspective. Michael Ford is senior marketing development manager with the Valor division of Mentor Graphics Corporation. Utilizing his 30-year experience of industry knowledge, Ford examines key business objectives with his technology expertise to find solutions and opportunities where the industry had previously faced challenges. He began his career as a computer software and hardware engineer and created and managed manufacturing solutions for Sony where, he became one of the first successful adopters of computer technology for manufacturing, materials, and testing for the PCB-A shop floor. Ford is well versed in the principles of Lean thinking and sustainability and offers his expertise and knowledge in this bi-monthly column.