Tactics to Derisk Ramp

While originally written in 2021 for electronics companies planning to ramp in one of the most challenging environments ever for electronics devices (chip shortages, shipping shortages, China travel challenges, Covid-19 shutdowns, incredibly long lead times, and uncertain market conditions), the following tactics are generally helpful for any leader thinking about their upcoming ramp and how to ensure they will deliver product into their sales channels on time. I've updated them to align with what operations leaders are facing right now.

1. Ensure you've got all of the parts you need

Don't throttle your top-line revenue. Ensure that you've got a team keeping an eye on lead times so that you can make your orders as late as possible but not too late that you go short. Why not stockpile more than your buffered amounts? Your CFO cares about cash-to-cash time: the days between when money is spent and when revenue comes in. Balancing risk with safety stock and financial KPIs is important to achieving organizational-wide goals. One way to further de-risk your supply chain is to qualify multiple vendors. It's best to start this process in NPI, but you can still run mix-and-match Post Ramp Qualification (PRQ) runs in production.

2. Bring up new lines strategically

Depending on your volumes, you might need to qualify new lines to hit your ramp numbers.

For those building with manufacturing partners abroad, it's become trendy to do NPI in one facility (often in China) and then move it to another facility (outside of China) for production. That move is risky -- at a minimum, it will add an entire development build to your schedule, potentially more. If this is your situation, move as early as possible and no later than DVT.

If you need multiple simultaneous lines, remember that line qualification is an entire process to run and ensure you save time to do it well -- complete with end-of-line SPC measurements, Out-of-Box (OOB) audit, and reliability qualification. Engineers spend so much time making just one line work that it is inevitable that new lines will introduce new problems that may have yet to arise in development. Operations leaders working to qualify production lines should minimize variables where possible: use your baseline SKU and leverage your experienced "golden line" operators to ensure you can get replicated performance on the new line.

Adding temporary inspection steps -- manual or AI-enhanced -- can speed up identifying where things are going wrong and which operators need additional training.

3. Monitor part and process quality

You'll need to monitor part quality from upstream suppliers and process quality at Final Assembly, Testing, and Packing (FATP).

For parts -- some upstream vendors may fail to deliver on the promised quality or specifications when ramp starts. Maybe they were cherry-picking 10s of parts for the NPI builds, but now that you need 20,000, they cannot cherry-pick their way to the specification. To combat this, review your suppliers' ramp plans and visit their sites to understand their true yields.

Chris Li, a former Product Design Manager at Amazon who led several Kindle programs shared that during the Kindle 2 ramp, there was a surprising quality problem with the packaging vendor. During the prototype builds, they received great samples, but the vendor could not produce that level of quality at higher quantities. The beautiful pulp packaging was still damp when it arrived at FATP and had holes in some corners. Instead of scaling up and getting our product out, Chris's team had to slow down and implement a screening process for quality control while simultaneously investigating the root cause. They trained inspectors at IQC and on the line to look at the packaging and reduced their initial channel quantities.

I've had a similar experience on almost every Apple program I worked on with cosmetic defects on enclosure parts. We waived cosmetics (scratches, dings, and dents) all throughout development, only to find that the vendor still needed to figure out how to build the parts in volume without damage. I remember receiving a "shipment" of enclosures to start PVT for an iPod Touch, and there were 11 enclosures in the box, and Incoming Quality Control (IQC) rejected two for scratches. We literally had nine parts to start PVT with that day.

Cosmetic damage is also an important process element to look out for at FATP. Try to have DVT be your first cosmetic build, instead of PVT. Put cosmetic failures on the pareto and hunt down the root causes early. As you bring up new lines, you'll need to do this work for each of them, but getting the process on the first line able to produce to the cosmetic specification is a huge milestone to dial in.

One last suggestion: do not outsource quality. Maybe you have a JDM model, and you think that your partner should be responsible for quality. The buck stops with you and the brand -- not the JDM. The ramifications of failure could be millions in costs or lost sales. Make quality everyone's concern and delegate an in-house owner to keep both suppliers and FATP on the right path.

4. Implement ongoing reliability testing (ORT)

Additionally, implement a process of ongoing reliability testing that periodically samples devices from your production process to ensure consistent quality. Devices should pass a subset of the most critical reliability tests challenging for your design. Watch for declining performance, indicating your process is out of control.

5. First Pass Yield (FPY) is an indicator of field performance

Measuring field performance at ramp is difficult, and return rates may fluctuate throughout the year as sales ramps up and down. The best indicator of performance in the field is your FPY. High FPY demonstrates that a process that is under control and producing assemblies with limited variation, which means units should perform consistently as validated during development. Low FPY indicates that the process is not under control, you can expect a lot more variation, and you'll likely see more escapes or deviations in the field.