A proven New Product Introduction process
- Many of our customers design products that have never been made before. As all good manufacturers know, going straight into production is a recipe for a disaster. We help our customers by suggesting the validation steps that make sense for their projects.
- The end result is that, after a successful pre-production pilot run, mass production can be launched with relatively low quality, delay, and cost overrun risks.
Each customer and each project is unique
- Many manufacturers use a centralized quality staff to work on all the orders of all customers. That doesn't work well when different customers have different standards.
- As a contract manufacturer, we have to work closely with each customer and know their needs and requirements. Our 'quality project managers' follow all the quality aspects of a specific project.
Reliability testing
- Quality of our manufactured products, at the time they leave our factory, is one thing. But our customers also want products that keep working in the hands of final users.
- To provide early warnings on product reliability, we help our customers by subjecting prototypes, or pre-production units, to tests that simulate actual usage over time.
- We also conduct reliability & safety testing on some products taken randomly from the line, at the request of some customers.
Component suppliers qualification and onboarding
- Far from following a one-size-fits-all process, we audit new suppliers in the way appropriate for the situation (is it a critical part, will this be a single source, does this part have a direct impact on product quality and is the standard high, do we need to ensure high capacity, will the supplier need deep technical capabilities...).
- For critical parts and high-volume projects, it is important to spend time explaining the expectations to the supplier and to get their inputs.
Process setup & control
- Our process engineers and quality engineers help the component suppliers reach the required quality level. They also help set up appropriate tools and fixtures for manufacturing. Our testing engineers set up testing stations and gauges.
- They then follow up on the hiccups of production and work on ensuring the big issues are fixed at the root and cannot come back.
Quality inspections
- The highest risk, for us, is probably receiving poor-quality components from suppliers. We have to run incoming quality control on pretty much every batch, to prevent those issues from impacting our productions.
- We also verify our assembly operations at different stages - first article, in-process, final, and outgoing. True to our goal of providing our customers with transparency and control, we send them all our outgoing inspection reports (with the full checklist and photos/videos).
The quality system in action
- Many factories have a number of quality activities but not a coherent quality system. Here is the basic logic on which we have founded the organization of our quality department (see below)
- A good quality system transforms customer requirements into an unambiguous quality standard, prototypes into a manufacturable product, and realistic objectives into reality. And it keeps customers happy and coming back.
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