Quote:
Originally Posted by Cowracer
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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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.