TROUBLESHOOTING AND CORRECTIVE ACTION SERVICES
"Fast, effective troubleshooting followed by even faster and effective corrective actions can salvage situations that might otherwise be far more damaging"
Electronic components are complex and delicate. Packages of dozens or hundreds of various components produce magnitudes of greater complexity. Inevitably, therefore, things go wrong from time to time in even the best run plants.
The consequences of things going wrong range from annoying (spikes in test failures) to catastrophic (lives lost). Most problems fall somewhere in between. Customers are annoyed, warranty costs become painful, jobs are at risk. In most cases, however, the amount of damage depends on the speed and effectiveness of curing the problem. Fast, effective troubleshooting followed by even faster and effective corrective actions can salvage situations that might otherwise be far more damaging.
Although we greatly prefer to work with clients to prevent problems, a substantial part of our work involves determining the cause of failures and designing corrective actions. The clients in need of those services are typically suppliers to automakers, telephone companies or other very large customers with profound importance to the client's survival.
We do not perform actual laboratory activities such as sectioning parts, performing electron microscope studies or running accelerated life studies; rather, we tell laboratories what tests to run and how to provide meaningful reports. This ensures the analyses are conducted quickly and efficiently. (It's easy to run up huge lab costs by failing to provide precise work instructions. It is also easy to be led astray by lab personnel who believe it is their function to interpret what the results mean.)
Increased inspection is not corrective action
A common “corrective action” consists of increased inspection. In most cases, however, the problem is not easy to see so additional inspection rejects a great many good assemblies without catching the defects. And once in place, inspection has a nasty tendency to become a fixture. It's not unusual to find massive inspection conducted because once upon a time it was used to screen for a long–forgotten problem.
Corrective action means fixing the process. Additional screening is not an acceptable corrective action. EMS Science of Soldering makes process analysis and elimination of defects easy.
Helping with the customer
The most important customers in industries with a few very large customers — like automotive and telecom — often know and trust us. They know we won't tell them anything but the truth. And they know we won't tell our clients anything but the truth, even if the truth is not what the clients want.
But the customer is not always right. Yes, we know the conventional wisdom about the customer always being right but that's naive. Customers make mistakes, too. They ask for "corrective actions" that are not good for them nor the supplier. ("Corrective actions" that drive up costs without producing any performance benefit are bad for everyone. The customer's problem remains and the supplier's strength is undermined. Weak suppliers hurt their customers.) When customers ask for actions that are not helpful to anyone, we can educate the customer and get agreement on a more sensible plan.
And there are times when the customer perceives a problem where there really is not a problem. This is especially true where acceptance is based on visual soldering criteria like IPC–A–610. Agreeing to "fix" assemblies that are reliable does not improve relations with the customer. The customer does not normally think "I like that supplier because it agrees to fix this." Instead, the customer thinks "the supplier is an idiot and it's a good thing that I caught this problem because the supplier would still be sending me junk."
Determining liability
Of course, the supplier is also a customer of other companies. And those suppliers can cause materials problems. Often, they don't want to accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions. When that happens, EMS can expose the real problem and negotiate with the supplier for compensation.
Accurate determination of the cause provides the basis for indemnification claims against suppliers. We tell our clients what can be proven and whether they were blameless in the event. It is not unusual for recoverable damages to run into several hundred thousand or millions of dollars.
It isn't realistic to believe that there will never be problems. The problems may be due to your own process failures, poor supplier performance or other issues beyond the control of you or your suppliers. When bad things happen, we can minimize the pain.
