On 4/24/14, 11:14 PM, Attila Kinali wrote:
On Fri, 25 Apr 2014 08:33:06 +0300
MailLists <li...@medesign.ro> wrote:
The recently acquired cash cow isn't working exactly as
expected/advertised. We still don't have a clue when/if the fundamental
(as in physics laws) design (we can't officially blame the cheap Chinese
manufacturer) flaw will be fixed (manufacturer replaced), but as our
main customer, which is used to (literally) blow up tons of (others')
money, isn't very concerned (for now), and the profit margin is (still)
high enough to replace (no questions asked, for the time being) the
failed units of the other (civilian/commercial) customer(s).
Sorry, but this is was not necessary.
Not every company is evil and not every company just works for the
short term bottom line.
It is very normal that problems show up in series production which
were not visible before in the prototypes or pre-series production.
Isn't this the truth. There's nothing like getting a few thousand units
out in the field to find all the weird corner cases that you thought you
had covered in your developmental test campaign.
While there might be a relatively cold calculus applied in giant mass
production (automobile ECUs) where there's a carefully tuned analysis of
"what does it cost to issue a recall, vs a service bulletin, vs just
deal with the failures", I've found that in specialized high tech
components (e.g. microwave widgets of one sort or another) the mfrs are
all "stand-up" folks and really want to make YOUR end product
successful, because you're going to be buying more components from them
(maybe not the same one, but some others).
It's not like cars, where any one person buys one car every 3-8 years.
People who specify and buy components are repeat buyers. If I am
designing a product with any sort of production volume (or even small
volumes) and the supplier drops the ball, especially if they do it
twice, I'll probably think real hard about whether i need that
component. On the other hand, a supplier that makes the effort to make
things right will almost certainly get my repeat business. The
supplier who responds to my 530 Friday afternoon email with a possible
answer at 10PM that night, just because they happened to check in, so I
can go in and resume tracking down the problem on Monday morning is a
supplier that will get repeat business.
The anomaly in the microwave component business is the hobby guy or
gal who buys 2-3 pieces for a project, puts it on the shelf until they
get around to doing the project 6-12 months later, and never buys again.
Jim
_______________________________________________
time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com
To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
and follow the instructions there.
