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Old 11-27-2019, 11:12 AM   #41
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Whirlpool?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mythplaced View Post
These are not new concepts but have been in place for decades. That is why you can buy products that never fail.
I have a 1997 Honda lawnmower that still starts first pull. Yes 22 years old!
I just (sadly) replaced a Whirlpool washer and dryer the late DW bought 35 years ago, in 1984. It served a family of four until the kids moved out in arond 2000. During that time, it got
  • 3 water pumps, $14 each
  • 1 motor, maybe $40-50
  • 1 fill valve, $14
  • 2 belts, $5 each
  • 1 outer tub, $150
and a funny controller board problem--couldn't get the board any more, but I isolated the problem to a failed triac. Cost, abut $0.50.

The new DW wanted a "bigger" washing machine to wash the quilt that I had been simply sending out once a year. The salesman wasted no time telling us we would not get service from the new one that we got from the old one. And I fell for the extended warranty pitch. This purchase was made two months ago.

It was with a sinking feeling that I looked on the Free stuff on Craigslist and saw that someone was giving away the exact model we had just purchased.

The corresponding dryer had:
  • 3 belts, $7 each
  • 2 thermostats, $4 each
  • 2 high-limit switches, $3 each.
It wasn't "high-capacity" either.

Is that the level of quality I would have been willing to pay for? NO!! I would have been glad to pay more. But what's better than a Whirlpool. They bought Maytag! Maytag is now a tarted-up Whirlpool, as Escalade is to Suburban. Just a few more non-essential features to break.

MIL-HDBK-217, published and revised since the 1970s tells you how to calculate the reliability of any electronic assembly. Basically you take the failure rate of every component and multiply by it's acceleration factor in the given application, and combine them. For example, a capacitor might have a failure rate of .005 % per thousand hour when operated at 1/2 of its rated working voltage. If operated at its rated working voltage that rate might jump to .020 %/1K hours. There are two lessons here:
1) Every single component contributes to the failure rate. Don't add components unless they are unavoidable.
2) Don't use a component at its margin
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Old 11-27-2019, 01:05 PM   #42
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mythplaced View Post
I have worked in Mfg Quality Assurance for 35 years and can prove that building in quality is cheaper for the company than either inspection or warranty. This is my passion and my career.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-...c-rac-36a2149/

There is an old (1979) but a good book. "Quality is Free" and the author clearly points out that YES quality is a cost, but it is far cheaper than non-conformance/failure.
https://www.industryweek.com/quality...ity-still-free

There are many many commodity items that perform at 100%.

Ever got a nonsterile bandage?
How about a non-functional BIC lighter?
Failed Q-Tip?


There are numerous commodity items that sell for <$1 that perform at failure rates of <50 PPM. If you do the design and process work right up front, quality products come out the back, it's as simple as that. Inspection is NEVER a good process step.

The aim of quality management, is prevention. Quality control is aimed at detection, finding problems as early as possible, and getting them fixed -- and that's a noble thing. But what we want to do is vaccinate the company with the quality philosophy of prevention. So instead of setting up the world's largest smallpox hospital, we vaccinate people and then we don't need a smallpox hospital. That's the same way you have to run a company, by preventing the problems. There really isn't any system you can put in place that causes things to happen; it's a question of understanding the basic concepts.

There is a reason that many of your cheaper $5 and under products have 'approaching-zero' defect rates, is because they are all almost 100% machine made. You don't have armies of workers rolling up q-tips. You have machinery designed to do only one thing, make a q-tip, and do it as fast and cheap as possible. The very nature of mass production demands it. But with RV's, you cannot automate hardly any of it at all. That's what I do (automation and process controls), and I have been to a few RV factories and I only ever seen one area where I could replace humans with robots in a cost effective manner.

RV manufactures have to live in that gray area of being mass-produced without actually being able to take much advantage of the benefits of being mass produced. I personally think they do a fantastic job all things considered. The logistics alone is enough to give me heartburn. Comparing RV manufacturing to any other kind of manufacturing is like comparing apples to hand grenades.

I'll concede the point that building the quality in is cheaper than inspection or warranty repairs. That's a no-brainer. But building in Rolls-Royce levels of quality in a Chevrolet will put you in the poor house in short order.

So it begs me to make my point again... How do you know how much quality to build in? There has to be a point somewhere where you say "good enough is good enough", right? (my German grandfather just rolled over in his grave). And as before, I say the answer is "as much as the customer is willing to pay for".

Tim
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Old 11-27-2019, 01:46 PM   #43
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cowracer View Post
There is a reason that many of your cheaper $5 and under products have 'approaching-zero' defect rates, is because they are all almost 100% machine made. You don't have armies of workers rolling up q-tips. You have machinery designed to do only one thing, make a q-tip, and do it as fast and cheap as possible. The very nature of mass production demands it. But with RV's, you cannot automate hardly any of it at all. That's what I do (automation and process controls), and I have been to a few RV factories and I only ever seen one area where I could replace humans with robots in a cost effective manner.

RV manufactures have to live in that gray area of being mass-produced without actually being able to take much advantage of the benefits of being mass produced. I personally think they do a fantastic job all things considered. The logistics alone is enough to give me heartburn. Comparing RV manufacturing to any other kind of manufacturing is like comparing apples to hand grenades.

I'll concede the point that building the quality in is cheaper than inspection or warranty repairs. That's a no-brainer. But building in Rolls-Royce levels of quality in a Chevrolet will put you in the poor house in short order.

So it begs me to make my point again... How do you know how much quality to build in? There has to be a point somewhere where you say "good enough is good enough", right? (my German grandfather just rolled over in his grave). And as before, I say the answer is "as much as the customer is willing to pay for".

Tim
I keep agreeing...so obviously you get what many do not get or do not understand and its sounds like it comes from witnessing the process, first hand.

The OEM closest to mass produced and automated is Winnebago. They need to compete with the broader market on price....the only way to do that, due to their cost of manufacturing is to "de-content". So they get the right price, but are woefully under-featured. So while they sell, they get everyone telling them they are missing features. So they add the features and their price goes up and they price themselves out of the market. Just look at the last 10 years.....

Minni-Winnie (back then). Prices kept rising so they scrapped the "not-affordable" model, for lower priced version.
So then comes the Outlook (higher end) and Access (stripped). The outlook got too expensive, so it got dropped. Then we had the Access which was too stripped, so they then had the Access Premier. That got too expensive and now we're back to the Minnie Winnie and the Outlook, both pretty basic and stripped with no higher end models.

And...having said all of that. Back in the day a rental company bought from me and from them. Paying higher prices for the flying W, they thought they would get better stuff and in some areas they did, others they did not. In the end, all (50) that they bought from them had slide failures due to a missing set screw in the slide motor. No big deal, other than it left renters stranded everywhere and gave them a bad name. And when they went to sell, the used coaches did not have the features that ours did and so were harder to sell in the used market.

I guess what I am saying is we can debate it all day long. It is not a "simple" problem to solve, it will take years. Maybe new suppliers. But its also not as if we are all turning a blind eye as many seem to think.

We have corporate guidelines and production standards that evolve all the time.
New testing procedures. We can build one proto-type and NOT another single unit of that type until it goes through all the testing and is signed off my multiple entities (head of engineerings, head of corporate QC, etc). That ensures we do not duplicate a problem over and over before finding it.

All of these changes fall on deaf ears as many people just assume no one is doing anything about it. Or that they could simply fix the issue if it were theirs, easy peasy.
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Old 11-27-2019, 02:22 PM   #44
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