What does a strong quality process look like in electronics procurement?

Capacitors arrived at work one day looking just right. The boxes were perfect, the part numbers were correct and the documentation for the part was all complete and well organized in a neat folder. A few months went by and some of the assemblies started to fail in the field. Investigation found that the capacitors had been remarked. They looked like perfectly normal parts passing through all of the normal inspections but on the inside they were a completely different part.

Components can look fine on the surface, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are fine on the inside. I recall a time where a colleague of mine received a shipment of capacitors. All of the parts looked to be in great shape – they were all packaged up properly, labeled, etc. Assemblies were built with the components and were sent out the door to customers. Shortly thereafter, the assemblies started to fail in the field. The root cause of the problem was that the components were remarked. That is to say, the components that looked on the surface to be one thing, turned out to be another when they were actually opened up and inspected. In this case, the components had been remarked and had been

Why documentation is more than paperwork

For many people within an organization documentation is simply paperwork which they rarely read through briefly at the start and then they are able to carry on with the rest of the procurement process. In much the same way that end user license agreements for software are read through briefly by most people until they reach the section where they are able to click the ‘I agree’ box in order to continue with the installation of the software, documentation from vendors is treated in a similar way by many people within an organization. However the documentation needs to be maintained in an organized fashion and then used in order to be able to prove that a component was procured correctly in the event of a failure.

In Electronics Sourcing, many would categorize documents as end-user license agreements that need to be scrolled through to get to the acceptance boxes at the bottom. However, documentation in electronics sourcing has to be treated more seriously. A good trail of documents is the first line of defense against purchasing flawed components and the last line of defense after the parts have been received when failures start to occur in the field.

Traceability is also “non glamour”. It is a silent component that supports a process and you do not even realize that it exists. If it fails, then the whole structure falls apart.

Vendor qualification isn’t a one-time checkbox

As stated earlier, most people’s experience with qualification is that once you’ve qualified a supplier that’s it; you don’t have to do anything else with them. They are put on a list of approved suppliers and then generally are left to their own devices and are rarely even thought about for 4 years or so.

It isn’t.

A supplier’s quality can vary. Their process may change in the future. Key people may leave the supplier. In 2019 the supplier may have had an active ISO 9001 certification but things could have changed negatively since then.

What should vendor qualification actually cover?

• Verification of current certifications (and their expiration dates, which people forget constantly)
• Review of the supplier’s own internal testing and inspection procedures
• A look at their counterfeit mitigation practices, especially for components sourced on the open market
• Reference checks with other buyers, not just the testimonials the supplier hands you

In our development of a procurement quality framework at Fusion Worldwide, we use a ongoing vendor qualification process that is never really taken off of the “to do list” of activities.  The process for vendor qualification is comprehensive and we can assist in a robust quality control process as well as the development of a quality process.  Click here to learn more about the quality control process at Fusion Worldwide.

Step 4: Special Testing and Verification

I have thought a lot about how to approach the inspection of incoming components. Unfortunately, I have not come up with anything that applies to all situations. As a result, most organizations treat all components the same. Components are either inspected visually as they are received or they are not. If a team does choose to perform an inspection, all components are typically treated the same whether they are passive resistors or capacitors that are purchased from a local distributor or micros that are purchased from a broker that the team has never purchased from before. The two primary drivers for this are typically speed and cost. Both are important, however, both can also be very dangerous if not properly managed.

When planning out an inspection process for components, it is generally a good idea to have the amount of inspection correlate with the risk of the part. In practice, however, the amount of inspection that most companies do is usually driven by speed and cost. A common approach to inspecting passive components is to perform a simple visual inspection, usually with the same amount of scrutiny for say a resistor from an approved distributor as for some obscure, obsolete active component purchased from a broker with whom one has no prior experience. In both cases, the parts are usually treated as if they were completely unknown to the company, with only a cursory inspection performed as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

For higher-risk components, inspection needs to go deeper:

1. Visual examination under magnification for remarking, resurfacing, or sanding marks
2. Dimensional checks against manufacturer specifications
3. Electrical testing to verify the part actually performs as advertised
4. X-ray analysis for components where internal structure matters

This fourth step is the most expensive but also the most critical step. It’s the most critical because it is the only way to verify what the manufacturer says about their process. By not performing this step, organizations are putting themselves at risk of a field failure that could cost millions to recall. Most organizations don’t realize the cost of a field recall until it’s too late. Once they have seen the cost of a field recall, they would realize that they could have saved millions by performing a physical audit at the factory.

Comparison of Inspection Levels by Risk Tiers

As always, I am more than happy to share my insights with you and help you grow. But remember that a simple table of inspection levels for different risk categories is NOT something that you can just copy and paste into your work-flow and start using. There are far too many variables at play into the complex process of acquiring electronic components. All you can do is use your own risk tolerance, end market requirements, etc. to determine a very minimal starting point for approaching quality of this nature. For markets such as aerospace and medical devices, this would be a very good place to start.

What actually separates good procurement teams from reactive ones

In all industries, there are many who practice what I will refer to as ‘inspections after the fact’. For example, a part is purchased, used in the assembly of a product, that product is distributed to customers, and then it is discovered that something is amiss with the part. At this point, an inspection is conducted to determine the root cause of the problem. These types of inspections are difficult and often expensive to conduct. For passive components such as capacitors, it is typical that once a problem is discovered, it is difficult to reverse engineer the causes of the problem. Even if the capacitor is found to be operating outside of the published specifications, it is often impossible to determine what specifically is amiss with the component.

The proactive teams are constantly inspecting items from their suppliers, monitoring the performance of their approved vendors, maintaining up-to-date approved vendor lists, and having adequate test capability (in-house or contracted out to labs). This team reads documentation as it is being developed by the part’s manufacturer, to understand the entire life of the part, not as a historical artifact that can be used to verify compliance in audits.

A supplier’s not meeting the small commitments they agreed to (i.e. deliver parts on time, etc.) will in time not meet the larger commitments which are clearly more important. A team of experts will monitor the approved suppliers of a procurement team to note the beginnings of a supplier’s process failing by warning the rest of the team of any deterioration in the supplier’s process. This can be noted when a part or parts arrive late or if a supplier is missing some documents from a data package for parts. A procurement team of experts will monitor these small agreements of their approved suppliers to ensure that a batch of parts that appear to be of good quality (e.g. perfectly-looking capacitors) do not fail in the field.

Quality in electronics procurement is not a department, it is a posture, and it will either run through everything you do in procurement or it won’t protect anything in procurement.