Cut Costs by Getting Your Engineers in the Field

I was excited to hear what Wayne Miller had to say about aligning “the field with the engineer.” Wayne is a builder, from his time at Apple developing the G4 Cube to engineering robots that prowled the aisles of Walmart. In recent years, he has found his home in Operations – and is now a Partner at the Product Realization Group. Working as an engineering leader and manufacturing executive has given him a unique perspective on product development. His ultimate takeaway is to get your engineers into the field.

In his experience, larger companies' engineering and manufacturing teams don’t understand the cost of a field failure – so it’s not a priority for them. Engineers are focused on meeting their schedule and innovating on complex requirements. Manufacturing and operations teams care about yield, throughput, and Bill of Materials (BOM) cost. For some products, the Total Warranty Returns (TWR) or a similar metric is just a monolithic item on the BOM. But where a stamped bracket might get negotiated down to the ⅓ of a cent, the TWR just is. Or is it?

We all understand that once a product is shipped, the organization bears a real cost to returns, refurbishment, and field service. Oftentimes, these costs are not well understood by the very individuals who have the greatest ability to impact them: the engineers. Wayne is a big proponent of opening communication between these teams, with the missing element being a singular data source that aligns KPIs across engineering, manufacturing, and the field. When the manufacturing line is down, it’s a big deal; when twenty robots are down in the field, it should be just as big of a deal. Both cost the company money and customers.

Wayne shares an example from his time at Bossa Nova Robotics. “We developed robots to drive through Walmart, scan shelves, and process inventory data. We deployed hundreds of these. The product worked initially, but over time the drivetrain stopped operating as it should.”  It was a painful process: the company spent a lot of money fixing units in the field by flying manufacturing technicians nationwide. Their customer didn’t get the expected benefit of the robots, putting the relationship at risk. The issue ultimately led back to a design and process issue that should have been picked up in testing, but it wasn’t because teams were focused on other engineering and manufacturing KPIs like shipping on time and improving yield.

The Cost of Field Performance

Field failures have tremendous costs, especially for B2B companies where every customer matters. Whether it manifests as scrambling engineers to the field (which includes travel costs, overtime, and lost capacity for development), fielding customer service calls and sending replacement units, risking the next contract with a customer, or penalties imposed by missing contractual obligations, there are real costs that come from quality escapes. These costs can easily be millions of dollars for our customers and are often some of the largest drivers of ROI beyond quality improvement initiatives. 

How aware engineering and manufacturing are of the cost of field failures is a bit industry-dependent. Mission-critical electronics manufacturers in aerospace, defense, networking, and communications tend to have clear goals around escapes, even if they don’t have metrics (escapes are, by definition, difficult to measure!). But in consumer electronics – most bets are off. We worked with one publicly traded consumer electronics company for three years before we finally figured out that costs associated with returns were actually in the marketing budget.

While field performance might not be in engineering and operations budgets, it still matters because engineering and operations are still part of the larger organization. If a large recall impacts the stock price, it’s everyone’s problem.

First Pass Yield is a Proxy for Field Performance

While Wayne advocates for a common data source that covers upstream suppliers, final assembly, and field & refurbishment (and Instrumental provides one), there are KPIs that engineering and operations leaders can use today as a proxy for field performance. The most important piece of manufacturing data is First Pass Yield (FPY). This is the percentage of units passing the entire line on the first try. The higher your FPY, the more in control and stable your manufacturing process is – and the less likely you are to have escapes in the field. 

The reason FPY is a proxy for field performance is that no test or inspection is perfect – for example, everyone acknowledges that human visual inspection is 80% effective at best at catching failures. Everyone has seen units that pass right at the edge of the specification – and whether those units are truly good or not relies on whether the limits are where they should be. For customers with poor FPY, we have seen escape rates as high as 4% of all input.

“Everyone Downstream is Your Customer”

Wayne believes that everyone downstream needs to be treated as a customer. “When engineering is done with the design phase, their key customer is operations. They provide service to operations to enable production and get it shipped.” Field support and engineering are manufacturing’s customers – in addition to the customers who are buying the product.

A few examples of doing this well in multiple industries:

• A medical device company had customer complaints of the device failing over time or after liquid splashed on the device. It took months of back and forth before the team aligned their manufacturing analytics on using a singular dataset to look at manufacturing performance compared to field performance and could see that it was a process issue that they could fix!
• An electrification company has a weekly meeting with the COO where they discuss field issues with engineering and manufacturing in the room – what caused them, what it took to fix them, and how the organization could learn from them.
• As an engineer at Apple, I personally loved EFFA (Early Field Failure Analysis) as an opportunity to really learn from customers what could be improved about the product. One key learning was inspecting devices in and from a retail store – we realized dock usage could be way more aggressive than originally thought and were able to improve it in the next design.

When your customer has an issue, it’s your problem, too. When that happens, “having data that everyone understands and appreciates is the unifier. If there are KPIs that everyone understands and can work on together, you can align priorities” and resolve the issue quickly. One of the best ways to build “customer” empathy, Wayne believes, is for engineering and operations to visit the field and to learn more about how field operations work at their organization. This ensures everyone is aligned on the company’s ultimate goal: getting high-quality products into buyers’ hands.