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Re: 'Industry standard' error rate. I admittedly haven't worked in manufacturing at anything even resembling that scale, but I did spend a summer working for a
by jlgreco 13y ago
Re: 'Industry standard' error rate.
I admittedly haven't worked in manufacturing at anything even resembling that scale, but I did spend a summer working for a company that assembled, sold, and installed PCs to local small businesses and (particularly) school districts. A 4-5% failure rate, at the point of installation, would have been absolutely inconceivable in that job.
Sure, there were lots of failures, most caused by assembly errors, some caused by damage during assembly, some due to component failures, but the vast majority were caught before the trucks were loaded. One guy with a rolling swivel chair and several industrial-sized KVM switches can verify that 500 (what you might expect for several computer labs across a single school district, for school districts the size we were dealing with) or so PCs will more or less work in really just a few minutes. I would assert that this sort of manual sanity checking is the sort of operation that is embarrassingly parallelizable too. Two people can check a batch of 1000 just as fast as one person can check 500. 20 people should be able to do 10,000.
And this was a small operation. Were we larger, it may have made sense to look into more automation.
Between those checks, and when they were hauled into schools and plugged in? Nothing much about a tractor trailer ride is going to make a PC go DOA.
So I guess my question is, what sort of QA are they doing at the factory to get a 4-5% DOA rate? Or if the QA is fine, what the hell is happening during the shipping? Are the devices overly fragile? If they are being damaged during shipping, could the same damage occur in the home?
- ajasmin 13y agoI don't know much about manufacturing either. But, wouldn't Sony also make sure their units "more or less work" before they leave the factory? I mean, the thing could be working on departure and dead on arrival.
- jlgreco 13y agoThat possibility is where this section applies: "Or if the QA is fine, what the hell is happening during the shipping? Are the devices overly fragile? If they are being damaged during shipping, could the same damage occur in the home?"
- anonymfus 13y agoFamous Xbox 360 problem (RROD) was not on arrival. So probably they mentioned this 4-5% statistics for some period of time, not for DOA.
- jlgreco 13y agoAh, that would make a bit more sense.
- silencio 13y agoNot that this happened with my fiancé's PS4, but OnTrac (a CA/NV? local carrier that Amazon often uses) has employees with an infuriating habit of throwing packages over gates. And I don't mean soft padded envelopes that really won't suffer from being thrown over the gate, but boxes including (from the last six months) computer equipment, a sunrise alarm clock, glass canning jars, bottles containing liquids, and more. hurled about 8 feet (to clear the gate) and down onto the stone behind it. The place I lived at before, they threw a box hard enough to leave a mark on the door. Then I have to waste my time complaining to OnTrac and Amazon about the broken glass and non-functioning equipment and return and replace it hoping the next delivery guy doesn't screw it up. Some days I feel like Amazon uses too much padding for something so trivial, and then I realize I have to deal with OnTrac and then there cannot be enough padding for my packages. I will not be surprised at all if the DOA rate takes into account factors like that.
- Aloisius 13y agoOnTrac likes to just leave packages in front of my door. On Market Street in San Francisco and mark the packages signed by "Door." Once in a while they'll ring the doorbell, but often I'll just find it there. So far, no one has stolen anything, but boy does it make me nervous.
- silencio 13y agoOh man. I live on Market too. OnTrac has done that same exact thing before, and sometimes I only discover it because someone passing on the street or a neighbor rings my doorbell to let me know I have a box outside. They also don't seem to be able to read, as they will accidentally deliver packages to xx30 when we're xx20 and vice versa. I hate them so much. I go out of my way to leave terrible feedback for shipping on every OnTrac package I get at this point. Their reps keep telling me they're not going to do it any more and still it's such terrible service that I would cancel Prime membership if it wasn't for most packages being delivered by UPS/FedEx/USPS.
- mikeash 13y ago