Sorry about the HTML but this is an abstract from the book The Practical Guide to the Low Voltage Directive ISBN 0 7506 3745 5
Metrics come in all sizes - what does your management want to hear? How much we spend - how could have been save with better project management and design control - how much compliance cost? How much R&D spend - How much compliance costs? (I believe that DELL commit 30% of R&D to compliance) I wonder why? I wonder if their competitors would advertise the fact that "We commit MUCH less than that - so buy our products." Does sell to me!!! But I have been called cynical by more that two people. LOOK at history for the TRUE cost of getting it wrong. These - hopefully explain the TRUE cost of 'keeping it right' and not just consider the cost of adding a few extra scraps of metal or fuses. Titanic ( faulty material) Challenger (Faulty gasket) Meteosat (the one with the dead French PSU that should have driven the down-link Tx) Herald of Free Enterprise (faulty 'safety' switch and operator error - drunk and asleep) GoodYear Tyres (jury still out) The problem with compliance is that the TANGIBLE COST is always evident - it is only when there is non-compliance that the intangible benefits become self evident. Please not the following abstract and the graphs. PLEASE remember that the cost indicated here are from 1991 data. However - if we are looking at OVERALL costs think also of a few of the high profile examples. COPYRIGHT Butterworth-Heinemann and Gregg Kervill The Limitations of the guidance notes In addition to a detailed step by step guide to electrical safety, this book contains an Easy Guide. This provides simple, easy to follow steps that will result in a compliant product, at the same time reducing design effort, and simplifying safety compliance testing. The strength of these guidance notes is that they reduce development time and design changes, because by following the guidance it will remove many opportunities for designing a non-compliant product. The penalty for using only the Easy Guide may be that the unit cost is higher than a similar product designed following the Detailed Guidance notes. The Easy Guide is therefore particularly suited to the design of one-off equipment and low volume products Conversely, the Detailed Guidance Notes will be required for high volume, low margin products. They describe all aspects of the standard in depth allowing the designer to take advantage of low cost design options to minimise the unit cost of the final product. The penalty for using this approach is that greater knowledge of the standard and its interpretation is required and the cost of safety compliance verification can be significantly higher. Reducing costs and time to market It is surprising how few people appreciate that most of the whole life costs of a product are fixed early on during the initial design phase. The adjacent diagrams show the relative costs that can be set in stone even before the design reaches the manufacturing department. It is important for us all to be aware of the large amounts of money involved within our company and where it is committed. With this knowledge, it is a simple process to identify the departments and individuals where any company investment in training or resources have the most beneficial response. Remember that these ratios will depend upon the type of product, the volumes and manufacturing processes. But let us also consider the cost of a simple mistake - it has often been said that failing to plan in planning to fail and so in this book we shall acknowledge that we all are fallible - that we will make mistakes and accept that when they occur they form a significant source of additional costs and delay. This is an important consideration because if we know that there will be errors - then we know that to look for them is a good and positive thing to do. The cost of not getting it right has not been stated more clearly than during the October 1991 EuroPACE Quality Forum. Mr. Hiroshi Hamada, the President of Ricoh, gave the cost of fixing a single defect as: · $35 during the design phase · $177 before procurement · $368 before production · $17,000 before shipment · $690,000 on customer site >From this it is simple example it is obvious that the earlier an error can be identified the more money a company will save. Figure ??? It also follows that - since time and money are related - that if defects are corrected early then it will take less time for a product to reach production - hence the time to market will be reduced. Spend VERSUS Committed Cost Personally, I believe that the most powerful way to identify where resources (time, money and material) are wasted is to consider the Spend during each phase in a project and to compare these to the Whole-Life costs that are committed during that phase. Figure??? The following figure shows the classic - text book - spend curve. From my 20+ years in R&D I knew where the least money was spent and where most savings could be have been made on projects that I had been involved on - but I could not prove it from the graph. Several years ago I hit upon the answer. We can see that the spend is least during the early (Concept to Pre-Production) stages and that the spend only starts to increase once we hit production. At the end of the product life cycle we can derive a figure for the Total Cumulative Spend. Now comes the interesting bit - we ask our manufacturing engineers how much they were able to change the design of the product to reduce the cost its cost. In the traditional type of industries that I have one would expect a claim of between 5 and 10 %. Now we ask the Pre-production engineers the same questions. Finally we ask the Design engineers the same question. We now look at the money invested into the product design at each of those phases and ask - could the total cost have been reduced by spending more during the concept phase. Some examples of how money could have been saved. 1- Ill design my own power supply to save time. The time to verify the design of a simple linear power supply can vary upwards from 10 days - but plan on taking 20 days. The worst design I saw could not be modified to make it compliant: even after more than 50 man days of engineering effort. Using fully approved power supplies saves design time, and saves compliance testing time; but they will need to be tested in application . 2- It was all right in North America therefore it must be OK over here. Generally if the different frequency or voltage do not cause a non-compliance the use of UL Deviations against the IEC standard will. ( Deviations are where the North American standard deviates from the requirements of the IEC standard - in many instances these produce a relaxation to the original requirement and the resultant produce may fail to comply with the relevant Harmonised European Standard. The converse is also true. The product designed to our Harmonised standards may fail to meet some of the design requirements to North America or Canada.) 3- Creating a Critical Items List will prevent non-compliant slots and apertures being designed into what may need to become a Fire Enclosure. 4- Developing the self discipline to collect Safety Certificates and reports for Critical Components during the concept and design phase will save many days of avoidable effort (and avoid additional Costs) during Compliance Verification 5- Conducting early safety compliance tests and reviews will minimise redesign, scrap and delays. 6- Holding a product safety review to discuss the design concepts will identify and help avoid options that could involve high risks or costs. 7- Holding Product Safety reviews between project phases will quickly identify potential difficulties and non-compliances and allow quick (cheap) corrective action to be taken. 8- Stopping a project from progressing between phases until safety activities are completed will always reduce risks and may also reduce costs. 9- Balancing compliance proving cost against production costs may not be easy but it is now an essential task for designers. Based upon the author's experience, many companies could reduce their design costs by at least 10% and reduce the time to market for most products by four weeks. To achieve these improvements, define clearly the product safety design requirements, ensure that the design team understand the requirement and include product safety review as part of the normal design process. Eurolink Ltd. -One Link-199 Countries P.O. Box 310 Reedville, Virginia 22539 Phone: (804) 453-3141 Fax: (804) 453-9039 Web: www.eu-link.com -----Original Message----- From: owner-emc-p...@majordomo.ieee.org [mailto:owner-emc-p...@majordomo.ieee.org]On Behalf Of wo...@sensormatic.com Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 3:20 PM To: emc-p...@majordomo.ieee.org Subject: Metrics My management is asking each engineering group to devise and apply metrics to our department operations. I have struggled for a couple of years to devise meaningful metrics as applied to EMC and product safety compliance testing and certification , but with little success. Some ideas have been: * % of received products that are found to be fully compliant without design changes * elapsed test and certification time * defects per unit (for example, number of fixes required to be safety compliant) * hours of actual test time vs.standard test time What metrics are you using and how well are they working? Richard Woods Sensormatic Electronics ------------------------------------------- This message is from the IEEE EMC Society Product Safety Technical Committee emc-pstc discussion list. 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