When inspecting general consumer goods (except food), most companies classify defects and checkpoints in these 4 categories: Aesthetics & smell Conformance to specs (including measurements) Function, usability, reliability Safety & regulatory But how about precision mechanical parts inspections, made from metal, plastic, resin, or other polymers? … [Read more...]
Should You Avoid the Words “Defects” and “Defectives”?
Someone on Linkedin wrote about the distinction between these 2 terms: Defect Defective I actually see a lot of confusion around them. What does the standard say? ISO 2859-1 includes these definitions: Defect: non-fulfilment of an intended usage requirement Nonconformity: non-fulfilment of a specified requirement (Note: In some situations specified requirements coincide with customer usage requirements) Nonconforming item: item with one or more … [Read more...]
The 5 Levels of Quality Standards: From Worst to Best Practices
Setting clear quality standards for each type of product you purchase in Asia is a basic need. Like in "to keep living, breathing is a basic need". Despite this, very few companies that have production in China or Vietnam take the time to do it right. And, as a result, they have to suffer quality issues, misunderstandings, and the breakdown of trust with their suppliers. Let's go through the 5 levels of quality standards, from most basic to most advanced. … [Read more...]
How HALT and HASS Can Help your Product Development Efforts
HALT and HASS are accelerated product reliability testing methods focused on finding potential defects in products. These acronyms stand for: HALT – Highly Accelerated Life Test HASS – Highly Accelerated Stress Screen If you are developing a new product ready for manufacturing and you want to know if it will keep working as planned after a few years of use, you can send a few samples to a testing laboratory and ask them to perform HALT and/or HASS. These types of tests are … [Read more...]
Why the AQL tables are not in favor of the buyer
This is the third and last video about the ANSI tables (also known as “AQL tables”). As I explained in the last video, these sampling schemes were designed for very stable relationships, where the manufacturer keeps making the same products and keeps shipping them regularly (e.g. twice a month) to the same customer. As a consequence, the assumption is that quality is under control. And an inspection is used to catch the big accidents. What it means is that the statistics are way, way … [Read more...]
4 Proven Ways To Enforce A Quality Standard In China
How can importers establish a quality standard, and then enforce it? Here are 4 proven ways to enforce a quality standard in China and other Asian countries, and also improve how you handle your suppliers, too. … [Read more...]