31 Jan
2003
31 Jan
'03
11:46 a.m.
> proved to be critical. The bean counter got
fired, because this fiasco
> cost the company about $35K. (The supposed savings would have been
> about $1K.)
Geez Eric, I dunno what planet you were working on,
but every company
I've been with, half the production staff and every one of the janitors
would have been abruputly shown the door on a Thurday afternoon, and the
Bean Counter in question would have been promoted to Exec VP at some
expensive off-site PR extravaganza... then the salry and hiring freeze,
coupled with telephone usage scrutiny and new draconian Corporate
Recycling Guidlines.
Sounds more what I experienced over the years, and I work at a
company which sole existance is to screw things up that way.
I mean, as in designing a nice low cost slim line ISDN phone,
just to find a 'manager' replaceing a 40 cent speaker by a
replacement part fo only 17 cents ... times 100.000 realy a
great improvement. And he even didn't need to ask engeneering,
because the chineese supplyer said it's in spec ... when the
stuff arived at the factory the base was just by 2/10th of a mm
to big ... no problem, have the PCBs redrilled and it works.
They even managed it to be cost neutral (well, using up most
of the 23 saved cents per pice). Several tousands got sold,
and a huge number of complains did come in. in hands free mode
the phone was basicly unusable. Not only because of the poor
speaker quality, but also due heavy coupling between mike and
speaker... Of course the next step was to blame the audio
calibration depatment for poor quality ckecks and bad design
(oh, did I mention that they stoped sending in samples for
audio checks after the irst few days of production - which of
course still had the original speaker, not the cost saveing
part). The audio engineer needed about 20 minutes to figure
that due tolerances in height of the speakers base at some
40% of all phones made the speaker contact to the upper case,
exactly the same plastic part where the hands free microphone
was mounted.
The result? The audio department are the bad guys, the manager
got promoted. You want more, what about saving a one time cost
of ca. 5000 Euro for molding tools for a case, just to be find
again that the original design did need additional structures
to avoide audio problems ... as a result a way more powerfull
(and expensive) DSP had to be used to calculate the systematic
noise out of the signal, and all, because a years production of
housings had already be made before the first phone was produced!
Hey, they could save a few bucks if they did it as one big order.
To me one of the most unbelivable things is that our over all
quality is still rated top notch ...
Gruss
H.
--
VCF Europa 4.0 am 03./04. Mai 2003 in Muenchen
http://www.vcfe.org/