Ship It!

The fourth-generation iPod Touch was my first PVT. I had joined Apple the summer before out of graduate school and had spent the last year drinking from the firehouse of CAD design, fear-tolerancing the heck out of my drawings, picking up the jargon, and traveling to China to walk the line for hours. It was a sticky August in a farm-dense suburb of Shanghai, China. And we were line down because of my part.

Apple's secrets are Apple's secrets, and I won't spill them here. While I owned several parts in the product, including the main logic board and shield cans, the speaker (the first post-consumer recycled content part Apple ever shipped!), the microphone, the gyro... But those weren't the problem part. The problem was another component that was supposed to be as simple as a component on the board and a piece of foam. Except that it wasn't. Executives had been user-testing the product, and the performance was unexpected. It was eight days before we were supposed to start ramp. When you're that far along, you've got only three fixes in your arsenal: manual glue, tape, and foam. If I worked at a different company that was more integrated, you might add "software" to that fix list. But that's it. That's all you can build a DOE of, validate, and start ramping fast enough to catch up to the rest of the BOM.

Every PVT I was ever on was fraught with a major issue (not all of them were my parts, but by the time I was leading programs, they were all my problem). At Apple, we had a rule that the design team did not get to go home until OK2Ramp, and often, we stayed behind to help our operations teammates debug replicated lines. Apple builds at such a mind-blowing scale the ramps are impressive operational marvels: hundreds of parts across hundreds of vendors going from one line making 5,000 / day to ten, thirty, or even a hundred lines making over a million a day. People might think that Apple is a quality-oriented culture, but it's actually an execution-oriented culture. Apple's manufacturing operations team comprises some of the best executors in the world. There's a reason this talent was highly coveted in the 2010s as Apple's hardware engine started spinning off highly experienced manufacturing and quality engineers and leaders.

For the operations leaders in the audience -- I know I'm not one of you, and I don't have the experiences you have. I have run Instrumental for nearly a decade and benefited from working with and alongside some of the world's most talented operations leaders. I've gotten the opportunity to see how a variety of world-class companies across multiple industries -- consumer, medical, industrial, aerospace, defense, appliances -- scale up their manufacturing and deliver for their customers. I've seen teams struggle with low first-pass yields, high returns, and recalls. I marveled at leaders who did the impossible: sailing through PVT and right into production with high yields and low return rates. I've seen large-scale line replication across many global factories, and intricate hand-building in a clean room where the "takt time" was hours. I've seen leaders leverage JDMs with great finesse, saving their organizations millions of dollars, and others completely check out only to be surprised when product returns spiked.

This chapter is dedicated to the "get it done" operators I've had the delight of learning from and working with, and is a collection of articles focusing on the how to's of actual production for electronics products.