Tales from the Quality World- Broken tabs

Tales from the Quality World — Episode 5: Broken tabs

During my stint working with electronics and garage door openers, we had one customer who designed the housings they needed for our PCB to be installed into their mirrors.

The contracted manufacture of the PCBs installed the boards into these housings, packaged them in a box with cells and shipped them to a Tier One in Japan. This Tier One customer would install them in a mirror and ship to a Toyota plant.

I began getting complaints from my T1 contact that the tiny prongs on the housings were coming to them broken. Our engineering team had told the Tier One that these prongs were NOT a robust design, but they went ahead with this design anyway. They began sending 30–40 units back every month to be replaced with new parts. My contract PCB manufacturer checked their line for possible points of damage and could not find any issues.

So I ordered a couple hundred housings from the directed source plastic molding facility and had my customer send broken housing parts back to me. I set up an ESD test station on my desk (electro-static discharge). This was necessary to protect the PCB components.

When I got the first batch of 70 units from my customer with broken tabs, I removed the PCBs from the damaged housings, installed them into new housings, moved the barcode label over to the new housing and recorded the serial numbers. I certified these parts as functioning AND with no broken tabs. All parts were packaged back into cells in the box and shipped back to the customer.

Then a funny thing occurred. The next month, I received another batch of line accumulations from my customer — and guess what! Several of the returned housings were parts I had just sent back to them from my previous month’s rework. This validated my suspicion that the customer was damaging the parts during their installation process. After discussion with my manager, I determined how much time it took me to perform the rework operation including the cost of the new housing. I then sent this quoted cost back to the customer, informing them of my findings regarding the broken tabs and indicated we would not be accepting parts back any longer for broken tabs to replace at no charge.

Once this was communicated, the next month’s rework was considerably fewer and after a couple months, I no longer got units back from this customer.

I don’t know how much my contact at the customer was actually informed of regarding assembly processes. Many times, supplier quality in a facility is not given good information from the production lines as to actual failures, with the assumption that if the ‘defect’ is dumped into the supplier bin, so to speak, someone else will take care of it. This illustrates why supplier quality really needs to be engaged with production.