What happens inside the factory: tooling, inspection gates, capacity and quality control.
Lead time is not a property of a product, it is a property of a schedule. A factory that quotes four weeks is quoting a slot, and slots are allocated in a specific order that buyers can plan around.
Field complaints arrive in the same shape almost every time: a unit failed, the customer wants to know why, and they want to know what stops it happening again. The structure that answers both is 8D — eight disciplines, of …
When a batch fails an inspection gate, the useful question is not “can you fix it” but “what exactly is being fixed, and how is it proved afterwards”. Rework is legitimate; undisclosed rework is not.
Cosmetic.…
Buyers often treat a batch report as a formality: a page of numbers that arrives with the shipping documents. It is actually a record of a statistical decision, and reading it properly takes about five minutes.
Most factory visits follow the same script: a meeting room, a walk along a line, a sample on a table. That format tells you very little, because every factory can produce a clean line for an hour. A useful audit …
Every charger bill of materials contains at least one part that is hard to replace: a specific GaN device, a controller IC, a transformer wound to a particular specification. When that part goes on allocation, a programme either has an …
A defect claim is not really a question about a product, it is a question about a production run: which components went into this unit, when was it built, what did the test data look like at the time. Factories …
A charger quotation that lists tooling as a cost but not as a duration is an incomplete quotation. For a new enclosure or a new plug mechanism, tooling is frequently the longest single item in the programme — and the …
A charger factory that says “we test everything” is describing one of three gates. The three gates do different jobs, and a programme that only has one of them is the programme that discovers problems at the port.
A rejected production run is rarely a manufacturing failure. It is usually an approval that was given too early, on a unit that did not represent the final configuration. Four gates, in order, remove almost all of that risk.
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