How we focus on quality & reliability for you

A definition of quality that we like at Agilian is “customers come back, not products”. That’s one of our key objectives, and we have put a number of systems in place to that end.

Most of our customers have a strong focus on making reliable products — which simply means they keep ‘working’ for at least a certain length of time.

We have woven the objectives of high quality and high reliability in our R&D, NPI, and mass production processes. Read below for more details.

Qualification and management of component suppliers

An ever-present risk is receiving substandard materials/components from suppliers. We absolutely have to prevent it in the first place where possible, and detect it & isolate it when it can’t be prevented. We do this through:

Factory audits that focus on the supplier's quality management system, on the new product development process (for custom parts), and on process controls.
Regular feedback on quality, cost, delivery, and service performance, to each key supplier.
Our R&D engineers try to help our customers find standard parts from solid suppliers wherever possible, thereby reducing quality risk.
Supplier quality engineers follow up during development, pilot runs, and mass production of components, and have to drive improvement.
Incoming quality inspections + testing stations (e.g. functional testing of PCBA, other testing as detailed below.)

In-house testing laboratory

To ensure we receive acceptable components, and to confirm our prototypes and products are durable, we routinely conduct these tests, among others, in our own facility:

A proven New Product Introduction process

By following a proven NPI process, we eliminate the major sources of risk while bringing new products to mass production. Some of the key approaches for cutting risk are outlined below.

We review your product design for manufacturability, both at a reasonable cost and on your quality target.
We run risk analyses on your design and make suggestions to address the main issues.
We help you define a clear quality standard, if needed.
We prepare fixtures, gauges, and tooling, as needed. Augmenting and mistake-proofing human labor in a smart way usually comes with much fewer quality issues.
We always do a pilot run, which includes troubleshooting, improvement, and possibly new run(s), before making a first batch of a new product.

Product reliability & durability

Depending on the intended use (e.g. 3 times a day, for at least 3 years) and the intended environment (e.g. outdoor environment including water splashes and -5 degC), we help our clients reach their reliability objectives.

Our R&D engineers suggest durable materials, add redundancy where needed, and run simulations in CAD software where possible.
For many customers, we run accelerated lifetime testing to find weaknesses of prototypes and suggest improvements.
Our quality engineers conduct failure analyses and draw conclusions useful for the next prototype... or the next version of the product.
We typically conduct reliability testing on pieces from the pilot run, to confirm their expected performance.
For some customers, we run burn-in tests as well as random reliability testing on production pieces.

In-house production quality control

What happens in our production facility is, and absolutely has to remain, under our control. We have adopted a series of practices that are conducive to consistent quality.

No employee is paid by the piece, and no unqualified operator or inspector is allowed to start working on his/her own.
We always prepare work instructions for the operators and we train them to those instructions. The line leaders check conformance to those instructions, and in turn the production supervisors check that the line leaders do that verification.
Our manufacturing/process engineers conduct in-process quality control at specified points, and try to get back to the root cause as fast as possible.
We use our spectrometer, which is a great tool for IQC, because it allows us to check if incoming materials' and components' actually have the specified materials which can be the difference between compliance and non-compliance.
We systematically do final inspections (a combination of OQC, FQC, and/or FPQC, as appropriate), and we send structured & illustrated reports to our customers.

We can include our automated optical inspection station on assembly lines, or after a fabrication process (typically PCBA), so it can catch certain defects that an inspector (who costs more per minute) might not detect.

It also records the data so they can be checked later. It takes photos, analyzes them, and records them (with the serial number when there is one).

Quality management system

To support all of the above, our quality manager has implemented a quality management system and the whole company is accountable for keeping it alive. That’s a wide topic, but a few of the most important blocks are listed below.

In production, some problems do come up. The key is to have a quick feedback loop, from the point of detection to the point of cause and to the root cause, and to follow a structured problem solving approach when the complexity of the issue calls for it.
Regular preventive work, such as 6S audits, pilot runs, staff training, and others, cannot be skipped and forgotten.
Complying with good practices such as document version control, engineering change management, a pre-established testing plan, and so forth, from the start of a project (R&D) to the routine mass production stage.

We welcome your involvement in the supply chain

Our bill of materials is transparent to our customers. That’s part of our commitment to helping you ensure transparency and control over your supply chain. And it allows you to go and see for yourself that we rely on a solid set of suppliers.

When problems appear — and that’s pretty much inevitable when developing custom parts for new & complex products — our engineers are hard at work addressing those problems, but our customers can also send their representatives if they want to know more by themselves. This approach helps educate our customers, who are better able to see risks and avoid issues in the long run. And it removes the (very common) suspicion that “the manufacturer doesn’t tell us everything”.

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