Today budget cuts, tight schedules, and the Covid pandemic have caused a lot of companies to cut corners, even really large brands with famous products, and one of the first things to go is quality and reliability testing of the products going out the door, but also improvements to their products for the next generation through less thorough design and development. This has an impact on component selection, and we’ll look at whether it’s better to use tried-and-tested components or new ones.
An example of a lack of management support
In the book ‘Cutting the Cord: The Cell Phone has Transformed Humanity‘ by Martin Cooper, there is one example that really caught my attention in terms of how in some industries there’s little management support in terms of quality improvements to a product (in this case an old radio with vacuum tubes instead of transistors):
Re-using tried & true modules
The author was about to start designing a new module based on transistors. He told his superior, who challenged him:– Why take a risk on a new design when we’ve got a tried and true tube that we’ve used for years in our two-way radios?
– I know that Bob, but that tube is overdesigned. It’s capable of handling over eighty watts–four times more than we need.
– The old tube is reliable, we know it well, and it will be coasting along in your radio.The author looked at the records of that module based on vacuum tubes. There was zero recorded failure in the field. And, to this day (50 years later), many are still in operation.
What is the possible cost of those reliability issues?
The manager would have been scared of the following:
- High NRE costs for the new transistor.
- If, say, 1% of those products fail due to that new module, and 100,000 products are sold, the total cost may be as follows:
– Handling complaints (time spent): 50 USD x 1,000 failed devices = 50,000 USD
– Executing the returns: [40 USD product value + 30 USD courier cost] x 1,000 failed devices = 70,000 USD
– Loss of customer goodwill: hard to calculate, but losing a key customer to a competitor can result in a loss of future profit in the millions of dollars.
– Exposure to liability, for example, if a hospital doctor is called for an emergency but the device doesn’t function: again, in the millions.
At the time, and this was decades ago, only the military really engaged in the kind of reliability testing that has now become normal and is one of the cornerstones of how we develop and launch new products. So component selection at the time usually focused on tried-and-tested parts, even if a newer innovation might have some benefits…the risks of failures were just too great to stomach for many managers.
But is this the case today, or is using new ‘cutting-edge’ components more accepted?
Why modern reliability testing makes using a newer part less of a risk
The decision to say no to the designer’s suggestion to use a new transistor to replace a tried-and-tested vacuum tube in the radio was made because in those days the quality, reliability, and development were pretty much non-existent and so, of course, you expected to have high failure rates for any kind of newly-designed product. As you already read, a high failure rate could be very costly.
That’s just not the case today in 2022, because Design for Reliability (DFR) has become extremely important during the product development lifecycle and has led to greatly reduced field return rates and lower return costs because most products are operational in the field and there are usually no major customer complaints (it’s more likely that there might be some small manufacturing and or component-related failures). So implementing new components in the product design stage, today, as described in this case is actually less risky if correct reliability testing is carried out.
Someone reading this and developing their new product might also think it’s a smart component selection approach to go with a tried-and-tested component that’s older and maybe not as efficient or powerful, but is a better choice from a reliability standpoint. But, as we are starting to move towards totally new technologies like autonomous cars that are using components we’ve never used before, such as lidar cameras that can actually see and understand things, we have no idea how it’s going to change our lives in terms of quality and reliability of the products. With today’s way of management, there’s a lot more open-mindedness towards new ideas and more tolerance for testing out new ideas than there used to be because they do have DFR and quality and reliability testing to reduce the risks of using new components.
Learn more about reliability testing here: How To Do Product Reliability Testing?
Companies today understand how important reliability is to their customers
Customers today demand reliability and in reviews, they even state what they expect at the minimum from their suppliers so there has been a major shift in terms of customer likes and dislikes and their openness to actually speak their mind.
NOKIA used to be the world’s number one phone manufacturer, but they failed partly because they refused to listen to the customers’ requirements and likes and dislikes. Their way of making a product was to make 10 or 20 product lines with different designs and see which one sold best, focusing on that one afterwards. They never actually asked the customer what kind of product they wanted beforehand and because of decisions like this and some other factors, they went out of business.
The rise of the internet has led to a massive increase in customer awareness, and this includes product reliability. Therefore, the companies making these products are listening to their customers a lot more than they used to and are building products that are geared towards making the customers happier. Since they don’t want to buy something and take it home only to have it break, online reviews and complaints will be damaging as customers don’t want to waste their time going through a returns process.
The point is that the world is totally different now than at the time of the example quoted above about vacuum tubes from the book. The main takeaway is that the times have shifted towards customer-oriented products where the companies must listen to their customers in order to build better products with fewer returns and a higher degree of customer satisfaction. To achieve this they need to do a very comprehensive DFR, DFA, DFQ, and testing to make sure that the final product is going to meet and exceed not only the design and manufacturing requirements but also customer requirements, too.
Learn more about the DfX product design optimizations in this episode of our group’s podcast: DFX: 12 Product Design Optimizations You Should Consider [Podcast]
Can choosing tried-and-tested components over others be a good financial decision?
A new component is most likely going to be expensive because they’re either a prototype or built only in low volumes. Also, their technology and reliability may not have been proven yet, so, although customers may benefit from new functions, your brand will be damaged by lots of returns and online complaints about an advanced product that keeps breaking down or being defective when sold, never mind footing the bill of the returns.
So usually when you are making the first design of the first version of your new product it’s more cost-effective and less risky component selection to choose tried-and-tested components because you want to make sure that you don’t have too many variables to deal with. In fact, the only variable is to know if your design is good or not. Then, once your design concept has been proven, you can go ahead and play with different kinds of new components and technologies in V2.0 or V3.0 to see which one will be beneficial for your product.
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