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Build Better Handbook: Table of Contents
  •   

    Start Here

    • Introduction to the Build Better Handbook

    • Manufacturing Term Glossary

  •   

    Getting Culture Right

    • Jeff Lutz: Team Culture Drives Product Performancepopular

    • Scrappy Ways to Execute Like Applepopular

    • Building a Culture of Quality

      • Building the World's Most Reliable Products: Insights from Medical and Defense Leaders
      • Fear Management
  •   

    NPI: A How To Guide for Engineers & Their Leaders

    • Leading from the Front

      • Marcel Tremblay: The Olympic Mindset & Engineering Leadershippopular
      • Anurag Gupta: Framework to Accelerate NPI
      • Kyle Wiens on Why Design Repairability is Good for Business
      • Nathan Ackerman on NPI: Do The Hard Thing First
      • JDM Operational Excellence in NPI
    • Building the Team

      • Quality is Set in Development & Maintained in Production
      • 3 Lessons from Tesla’s Former NPI Leader
      • Maik Duwensee: The Future of Hardware Integrity & Reliability
      • Reject Fake NPI Schedules to Ship on Time
      • Leadership Guidance for Failure to Meet Exit Criteria
    • Screws & Glue: Getting Stuff Done

      • Choosing the best CAD software for product design
      • Screws vs Glues in Design, Assembly, & Repair
      • Best Practices for Glue in Electronics
      • A Practical Guide to Magnets
      • Inspection 101: Measurements
      • A Primer on Color Matching
      • OK2Fly Checklists
      • Developing Your Reliability Test Suite
      • Guide to DOEs (Design of Experiments)
      • Ten Chinese phrases for your next build
    • NPI Processes & Workflows

      • EVT, DVT, PVT Stage Gate Definitions
      • Hardware Schedules are Driven by Iteration
      • The Shedletsky Test: 12 Requirements for NPI Programs
      • 4 Best Practices for Generational Knowledge Building
  •   

    Production: A Primer for Operations, Quality, & Their Leaders

    • Leading for Scale

      • Navigating Factory Moves and Scaling Production in an Era of Uncertainty with PRG's Wayne Miller
      • Steven Nickel on How Google Designs for Repair
      • Petcube’s Alex Neskin Embraces Imperfection to Deliver Innovation
      • Proven Strategies for Collaborating with Contract Manufacturers
      • Greg Reichow’s Manufacturing Process Performance Quadrants
      • 8D Problem Solving: Sam Bowen Describes the Power of Stopping
      • Cut Costs by Getting Your Engineers in the Field
      • Garrett Bastable on Building Your Own Factory
      • Oracle Supply Chain Leader Mitigates Risk with Better Relationships
      • Brendan Green on Working with Manufacturers
      • Surviving Disaster: A Lesson in Quality from Marcy Alstott
    • Ship It!

      • Serialization for Electronics Manufacturing
      • Tactics to Derisk Ramp
      • E-Commerce Ratings Make Product Quality a Competitive Edge
    • Production Processes & Workflows

      • Failure Analysis Methods for Product Design Engineers: Finding Sources of Error
      • Failure Analysis Methods for Product Design Engineers: Tools and Techniques
      • How to Improve First Pass Yield with Instrumental
      • How to Identify Dark Yield
      • JDM Operational Excellence in Production
  •   

    Thinking Ahead: How to Evaluate New Technologies

    • How to Buy Software (for Hardware Leaders who Usually Don’t)

    • Adopting AI in the Aerospace and Defense Electronics Space

    • Build vs Buy: A Guide to Implementing Smart Manufacturing Technology

    • Leonel Leal on How Engineers Should Frame a Business Case for Innovation

    • Saw through the Buzzwords

      • Managed Cloud vs Self-Hosted Cloud vs On-Premises for Manufacturing Data
      • AOI, Smart AOI, & Beyond: Keyence vs Cognex vs Instrumentalpopular
      • Visual Inspection AI: AWS Lookout, Landing AI, & Instrumental
      • Manual Inspection vs. AI Inspection with Instrumentalpopular
      • Electronics Assembly Automation Tipping Points
      • CTO of ASUS: Systems Integrators for Manufacturing Automation Don't Scale
    • ROI-Driven Business Cases & Realized Value

      • Building a Buying Committee
      • How to Buy Software (for Those Who Usually Don't)
  •   

    Webinars and Live Event Recordings

    • Get Me Outta Here! Racing to Full Production Somewhere Else

    • Tariff Talk for Electronics Brands: Policies Reactions, Reciprocal Tariffs, and more.

    • Materials Planning: The Hidden Challenges of Factory Transitions

    • Build Better 2024 Sessions On Demand

      • Superpowers for Engineers: Leveraging AI to Accelerate NPI | Build Better 2024
      • The Motorola Way, the Apple Way, and the Next Way | Build Better 2024
      • The Future of Functional Test: Fast, Scalable, Simple | Build Better 2024
      • Build Better 2024 Keynote | The Next Way
      • Principles for a Modern Manufacturing Technology Stack for Defense | Build Better 2024
      • What's Next for America's Critical Supply Chains | Build Better 2024
      • Innovating in Refurbishment, Repair, and Remanufacturing | Build Better 2024
      • Leading from the Front: The Missing Chapter for Hardware Executives | Build Better 2024
      • The Next Way for Reducing NPI Cycles | Build Better 2024
    • The State of Hardware 2025: 1,000 Engineers on Trends, Challenges, and Toolsets | Build Better 2024

      • Scaling Manufacturing: How Zero-to-One Lessons Unlock New Opportunities in Existing Operations | Build Better 2024
    • Build Better Fireside Chats

      • Aerospace and Defense: Headwinds & Tailwinds for Electronics Manufacturing in 2025
      • From Counterfeits to Sanctions: Securing Your Supply Chain in an Era of Conflict
      • Design for Instrumental - Simple Design Ideas for Engineers to Get the Most from AI in NPI
      • Webinar | Shining Light on the Shadow Factory
      • Tactics in Failure Analysis : A fireside chat with Dr. Steven Murray
    • Preparing for Tariffs in 2025: Resources for Electronics Manufacturers

      • How to Prepare for Tariffs in 2025: Leaders Share Lessons and Strategies
      • Tariff Talk for Electronics Brands
      • Talking Trade Compliance with Gabrielle Griffith
      • GUIDE: Moving Your Factory
  1. Build Better Handbook
  2. NPI: A How To Guide for Engineers & Their Leaders
  3. Quality is Set in Development & Maintained in Production

Quality is Set in Development & Maintained in Production

Estimated reading time: · copy link

It's very expensive to "improve quality in production." It's much more cost-effective to spend your quality dollars in development to ensure that you've created a design and process capable of delivering a great quality product. Then, all you have to do in production is maintain it. Each dollar spent to fix design issues in development will pay itself back in multiples by preventing bad units from ever being made or needing to be screened in production.

Here are some common misperceptions I've heard from operations and quality leaders arguing to delay working on quality until production.

AI rendering of operators on a manufacturing line

"I should wait until my product is more mature to address process issues."

Many engineers want to make sure a product is past DVT before really starting to work out the kinks in the process. Say you’re making a product with cosmetic requirements: it can’t be shipped with scratches. The parts will be prototypes in your first build, so they’ll arrive at your assembly line scratched. In your second build, you’ll waive scratches so you have parts to input (they’re just engineering samples anyway, right?). Eventually, it’s PVT, then Ramp, and you haven’t yet been able to validate that your final assembly line doesn’t scratch parts. And, of course, it does. At that point, you’ll try to figure out how to prevent the scratches. But by then, you’ll be throwing out a lot of defective units. Say you’re making 10,000 units a day — a 1% failure rate seems small, but that means 100 units a day are being thrown out. What if you made a fixture change now, in the first build, that would prevent all those scratches? You just saved 100 units a day at $200 each — $20,000 each day over two months of ramp.

"I can just screen out the bad units in production."

Okay. Maybe your organizational KPI isn't the final yield, but it should be. The company's stock price relies on things like operating margins -- and that includes the cost to produce the products you sell. If you own stock in your company, you are incentivized to keep those margins high. Also, you'll be a hero in your organization for doing so.

Treat the disease, not the symptoms. Each dollar to fix the issue in development is far cheaper than money spent in production to screen out units, particularly as you amass a bone pile of defective units that will have to be repaired or scrapped. That bone pile sits on the company's balance sheet and will also weigh down the company's financial performance.

Leverage development to design out quality issues that you would have to manage later

Think about assigning your development issues a priority rank based on what unblocks learnings and what will save you costs later. By spending a little more time (or leveraging Instrumental's AI-enhanced automated visual inspection systems if you don't have time) to solve issues discovered in EVT, you can reduce tool revisions and have a more mature DVT, PVT and ramp. By catching multiple issues early, you can make all of your tooling changes in one revision -- cutting your tooling revisions and their respective costs in half.

Managing issues in production

Occasionally, you will still have quality issues that surface in production where the best you can do is "manage" them. Perhaps it's a new problem or a latent one that you didn't discover. Then you are stuck managing those issues, which is the worst place to be because issue management is fragile. Managing an issue means that you accept a certain defect at a certain failure rate, and then you develop a process to reliably screen out those defects as early in the process and as cheaply as you can. Sometimes rework might be possible to recoup some cost. You will need to keep an eye on that process forever -- as you have turnover on the team or at the line, the process is at risk, and the issue could become unmanaged and leak defects down the line or escapes into the field. If you fix the root cause of these issues in development, you can save both the cost and the overhead of managing issues in production.

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