How do continuous product teardown, disassembly, and reassembly, improve reliability and quality? Let’s find out here…
What is a product teardown?
There may be some confusion about what a product teardown really is. Typically a teardown is used in competitive analysis when we are trying to figure out what a competitor has in their product, how they have designed it, and what kinds of components they’re using such as what type of ICS, brands supplying those components, etc, by taking the product apart piece by piece and examining everything closely.
So by tearing down their competitor’s product there is a lot of information to be gained for a business that is in the process of developing and manufacturing its own product in that niche.
There are a lot of well-known companies that do nothing but teardowns. You give them a product like a mobile phone and give them a list of information you require, such as what kind of chips are in there and from which suppliers. They will do a step-by-step disassembly without breaking the product if possible and they document the components and assembly with photos of every step, including the information you’re looking for about processors and components used, how many there are, how the process of assembly or disassembly was used to join certain parts together, for example with ultrasonic welding or screws, etc. The amount of detail and engineering expertise used to explain the technologies, especially if it’s a new technology or parts being used that nobody has ever heard of or new parts with a certain length, width, or thinness of the microprocessors; or even if special tools have been used in assembly. It’s just mind-boggling how much information these companies can actually obtain through a product teardown.
Internal disassembly is the cousin of a teardown that we do for different reasons
So if you were doing a ‘teardown’ of your own product then it’s not for competitive analysis, rather it’s for the purpose of understanding whether or not a repairman can successfully disassemble and repair your product, so it’s usually seen as a disassembly. With the increase of interest and legislation in the ‘right to repair‘ this is a very valid activity for manufacturers today because if you can put things together but can’t take them apart then you have to think about if it’s a good product design. Some companies purposefully design products to be hard to disassemble and reassemble, Apple is a prime example (although even they are changing now as the new iPhone 14’s more repairable design shows), but some will have simply made a design mistake that needs to be fixed, such as a device where the display cracks accidentally every time you’re trying to replace the battery.
How internal disassembly, product teardown, and assembly process all combine to improve reliability and quality
Let’s explore how we can implement an internal disassembly, an external teardown for competitive analysis, and then the assembly process to provide very good reliability and quality for a new electronic product (although the same principles provide similar benefits for most product types).
Assembly focus
Here are the related activities and benefits that wouldn’t be possible without product teardowns and continuous assembly and disassembly, starting with an assembly focus…
Lesson learned
The first benefit of continuous disassembly and assembly is that when you are actually implementing such a process continuously as part of continuous process improvement which is a quality function within your design team, you’re actually creating a ‘Lessons Learned document’ within the team so they start having a history of understanding about how they put together, for example, a previous product. They’ll consider this information with respect to this brand new product that they’re working on now, what are the differences between it and the old product/s, what technology was used on the old product, and what can we use in the new product to improve the assembly or disassembly.
Finding repeatability issues
Another benefit of continuous assembly and disassembly is that as you are assembling the product you run into all kinds of repeatability issues. You need to have a Gauge R&R process to make sure that the assembly process is repeatable and that one person is not put under too much pressure or assembling something different from somebody else. The amount of time each assembly operator puts into assembling a component is very important because if they’re putting in too much time then you know things will pile up on the assembly line whereas if they spend too little time they’re going to be sitting idle, so there is a science of assembly called assembly line balancing which is almost an art form. By doing it, you will balance the line so that pretty much everyone spends approximately equal time and effort on assembling (it may be that one operator does three very short tasks whereas another does one that’s a little longer, but overall they’re balanced out).
Mistake proofing
Then we move on to the next benefit, mistake-proofing or poka-yoke. This is really critical because if you don’t design your assembly process in a way that no mistakes can happen then you’re losing a crucial opportunity to reduce the risks of poor reliability and quality products being caused by production operators’ mistakes, such as screwing into the wrong location on the product.
Reducing the overall number of parts
Another thing to focus on with assembly is the number of parts being used. Reliability engineers have a saying that the more parts you have the less reliability you have. Of course, just one more part is not going to make the product very unreliable, that’s not how it works, but the more parts you have the more the risks of reliability issues because there are more opportunities for things to go wrong. You need to make sure you design the product to use as few parts as possible in terms of assembly and maybe even in terms of manufacturing.
Manufacturing automation is improving rapidly, however, there are certain parts and components such as boards and some components that still need to be assembled manually during mass production because you need a human touch and eyes to check and validate the workmanship and functionality of the components on the board. With this in mind, it’s very important in general that you have fewer parts to assemble in order to reduce reliability and quality issues and save time during manufacturing, too, which all costs money.
Disassembly focus
When you are disassembling a product you probably have a good reason for doing it.
One might be that you are disassembling a mobile phone for instance in order to repair an internal defect, for example, to change the battery or a broken display. Perhaps there has been a failure such as water getting into the device and you’re trying to see if it’s possible to revive it.
You may be disassembling a product in a product teardown in order to understand a competitor’s design versus yours with a focus on their chip usage, assembly techniques, etc, in order to aid your design team. But how does the teardown influence reliability and quality, too?
Modularization
In exactly the opposite of assembly, this time as you are tearing down the product you’re perhaps learning that the competitor actually has a much better disassembly system than you have planned. For example, you only need to take one screw out and just push out one part and then the whole thing comes apart cleanly with no breaks or scratches. Once it’s open, maybe you realize that they are using a lot of modules as opposed to multiple single components like 10 microchips in one little PCB area. This is pretty standard now, but it didn’t used to be like that. Now instead of assembling, say, the display on the manufacturing side the whole mobile phone assembly can be assembled as a module by some other company and they can just send it to you and then you put it together with the mobile phone like it’s one component. That really improved the reliability because the display module supplier will have already done testing and reliability analysis and made sure that every component and functionality of that display module met your requirements (hopefully!). Whereas if you have to assemble the whole thing from scratch, part by part within the mobile phone then you have to test the whole product and the number of parts that could go wrong and that module that was not tested before, will be huge, so reliability could be poor as a result of bad assembly, soldering, or connectivity issues. Combine this with automation and it could save a lot of time when repairs are done (see later).
Examining new technologies
When tearing down a competitor’s product you’re also looking at whether or not brand-new automated or manual technologies were used to assemble the whole product. You’re also examining if components use new technologies, for example, component packaging. This might be a low profile very thin packaging which is very important if you want your device to be slim, a must in mobile phones, tablets, etc; also glass, too, where weight-savings can be made for aircraft, etc. The examination of those new technologies can also provide some understanding of the challenges of using them, for example, how do you disassemble a microchip with very high pitch connectors (the connectors that have so many pins that are so close to each other that when soldering through them or repairing, you want to make sure that you don’t accidentally short any of the pins).
Examining design aspects
During a product teardown, you may also compare the competitor’s product’s design with yours. Common realizations are that their design is more cost-effective and/or more efficient in terms of energy use, battery use, etc. Understanding the brand and size of the battery, processor, etc, they use, is critical information and you would subsequently look at how they designed their system to achieve better results than you.
Assembly and disassembly and its effect on cost
The next thing to consider is how long it takes to assemble or disassemble this product. If it takes way too long it’s going to cut not only into the cost of the manufacturing of the product but also it means that you have too many parts. If it takes too long to disassemble it has a similarly negative effect and means that it’s overcomplicated and you may require things like special tools, for example. Are those special tools even going to be available to the public or repair services? If you don’t have an efficient way of assembly and disassembly the product probably won’t be cost-effective to repair because labor is expensive. Longer repairs will therefore be more costly and anyone who has suffered from a broken display on an iPhone and paid Apple to repair it will know that to be true. Unfortunately for your business, another cost may be lost customers because some users might just buy a second-hand phone, for example, rather than spend three hundred dollars just to repair the display of their current one. So there are these cost elements that you have to keep in mind when you’re designing your product and analyzing your competitors’ disassembly and assembly processes.
The difference between day and night shifts in the factory
Believe it or not, whether the product is assembled in the factory by day or night shift workers also has an effect on reliability and quality. If possible, specifying that the product should be assembled by day shift workers is better, although it has to be said that this doesn’t mean that night shift workers are reckless or careless in terms of quality; simply that people working through the night are more prone to tiredness which can lead to errors seen more often at night than in the day.
These assembly errors can introduce a risk of failure to the product that, in the case of many reliability issues, may not be known about until the product has reached the customer. So, if you have a very sensitive product like medical devices or airspace products, it’s best that they are assembled during the day shift.
Automation
Certain processes during the assembly and/or disassembly could be automated. If you’re manufacturing a brand-new product then you probably need to create tools from scratch to automate processes or utilize existing tools for a product that is less customized. This automation will allow for higher yields and reliability but also, when it comes to disassembly, those tools actually improve the repair time and customer satisfaction.
However, preferably you would come up with a tool where you put the device inside, push a button, and the tool knows how to disassemble it without causing any damage. Then the operator or repairman (or rework team for some manufacturers) can easily and quickly get into the device. If the design has been modularized, even better, because they will know how to disconnect the modules and get to the failed one, remove it, and replace it with a new module. The repair time for this process might only be a few minutes. In many cases for electronic devices, software allows the repairer to run a diagnostic which will show exactly which module is failing, before they open up the device. This is why modularization and automation are really improving the disassembly and repair processes.
Conclusion
When designing a new product it is worth using DfX principles to consider design for assembly and disassembly, as these have numerous cost and time-saving benefits, such as more streamlined production, using fewer parts overall, modularization instead of individual parts, and faster repairs. An important part of this design approach would be a product teardown of similar competitor products if you have them because you will learn how the competitors also designed their products to overcome challenges that you may also face which can positively influence how you utilize design for assembly for your own.
Over the years, I’ve found time and again that a product that has been designed to be assembled and disassembled more easily using the techniques outlined in this post is more likely to have better reliability and quality.
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Got questions about this topic or about how to design, develop, and/or manufacture your new product? Get in touch and we’ll be happy to have a conversation with you.
