Re: Future: 0603 versus 0402 parts

John Larkin wrote:


I don't think we'd do very well on a ISO9000 audit, because a lot of
what they do is undocumented practices and plain skill.


The premise of ISO is to document what you do, and to do everything
to your documents. Some companies set themselves up for a fall by making
it too hard to change those documents for special production runs.
Microdyne hired a "ISO" consultant who couldn't grasp the concept of
engineer to order work. The mess he set up caused us a lot of headaches,
and what one quarterly audit found wrong would be changed, then the next
inspector didn't like it, and wanted it changed again. We finally got
things changed enough to be workable, but I never had to suffer through
an audit. I told my boss that if an auditor tried to tell me how to do
my job that I was going to stand up and ask him to show me EXACTLY how
to do it. A lot of my work involved testing engineering samples, doing
special tests, failure analysis and qualifying new parts for production.
In between I did a high volume of production testing, writing test
procedures, and building test fixtures. How does an inspector who knows
nothing about electronics tell if you are right when you are still
writing the documentation or test software?


If you do have to go the ISO route leave as many loopholes for
changes as possible. Explain that there may be extra testing requested
by the customer, by in house QA wanting to verify an ECO was an
improvement, or anything else that may come up. I tried to get the
company to put all of our test procedures on the engineering server so
that only the current versions were available to the production test
techs was rejected.

Some lazy techs would run off 250 sets of datasheets, then use them
when the procedure was changed. Also: Make a policy statement, and on
the front page of your test data sheets that any blank instruction lines
do not need to be lined out, or the anal retentive ISO jerks will write
you up for that when someone forgets to waste time drawing useless
lines.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
.

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