原创 Is almost acceptable the new good?

Whether we like it or not, business is complicated and full of compromises, but some compromises make the whole system fail.

As engineers, we often focus our efforts on the details of a product design. Some engineers specialize in blank-slate design. Others focus on test and quality engineering. Still others provide expert guidance for manufacturing processes. It seems that, no matter what the industry, "almost acceptable" products have become the norm for what we collectively have come to believe is "good."

I'm not saying that every component of every product isn't good. But to me, "product" means my entire experience, from researching for products to selecting candidate solutions to purchasing the chosen product to receiving it. For me, a failure in any part of this supply chain engagement results in, at best, an almost acceptable product.

I've recently encountered a series of almost acceptable products -- not because the items themselves were poorly designed or manufactured, but because other aspects of the product experience were unacceptable.

A year ago, a company with which I was consulting received a sample of a PCIe chassis, backplane, and enclosure. The fit and finish were excellent -- the sheet metal was bright plated, and the seams were welded. This was a great solution for a new design challenge to repackage a research machine into a commercially acceptable enclosure. Based on experience, I thought this enclosure would give us a fighting chance to pass electromagnetic emissions standards for the new machine. We ordered a chassis and enclosure based on the sample unit we'd evaluated. What we received was vastly different from the evaluation unit.

I recently had dinner with executives from the company, and I asked about the change. They were surprised by the difference in what we'd evaluated and what we received. It seems that we had evaluated a Mil-Spec chassis and enclosure, but our understanding was that it was the commercial unit. We subsequently discovered that the salesperson had ordered a commercial evaluation unit, but evidently a Mil-Spec counterpart had been shipped by mistake. The jury is out on this almost adequate product. The executives inform me that the commercial unit with the same essential electronics that we use passes FCC part B. We'll see.

How about another almost adequate product? I recently received a single-board computer with a dual Xeon processor and 48 GB of DDR3 RAM. It's a powerful board that can handle the data it will be required to process. It's pretty nice for a dual-slot board. The only problem is that it isn't really a dual-slot card. Yes, the card itself occupies two slots of the PCIe backplane, but the cabling from the peripherals in the front of the enclosure requires another two slots. Also, perhaps the missed failure in this case is the fact that the custom heat sink requires cooling fans to be placed on top of the heat sink. The supplier's answer? "Customers put a short board next to this card for airflow."

Here's yet another almost adequate item from a colleague of mine. A medical device design requires a medical grade isolated UPS. After significant research and paper evaluation, a UPS was selected. It weighs more than 70 pounds. He ordered a single unit of this multi-thousand-dollar UPS and waited patiently for it to arrive. The big day came, and a truck arrived with the unit. It was heavy -- more than 100 pounds. The packaging material was pretty destroyed during the shipping process. Damage to the UPS itself wasn't visible until the box had been removed. Inside a second box was a collection of UPS pieces that had been part of the original unit. The UPS had come loose from its mini shipping pallet and evidently had traveled from Texas to California bouncing all of its 70+ pounds on the now-destroyed faceplate.

Of course, shipping accidents do happen. Another unit was shipped to replace the first unit. This arrived in a box that had been secured with duct tape. It too had broken loose from its pallet and had a destroyed front panel.

It was not exactly amusing that both of these units had wood attached to the faceplate with wood screws. Even if the shipping hadn't damaged the UPS, the wood screws holding a piece of wood onto the faceplate would have been enough to return the damaged unit.

Try entry number three -- another distributor, another order, another delivery. This time, the box came off in the hands of the delivery person. Once again, wood screws went through the wood and into the faceplate. Finally, my colleague called the manufacturer. The company agreed to ship a unit direct, even though its corporate policy was to send small orders through a distributor. This fourth unit looks like it has arrived intact, with no wood screws holding wood on to the faceplate.

These anecdotes illustrate three ways that products can become almost adequate: a change in production methods, a grossly inadequate datasheet, and shipping failures. We haven't considered the almost adequate design decisions that are all around us: the Christmas lights that might last a few dozen hours before they fail, "long-life" compact fluorescent light bulbs that fail as fast as their incandescent cousins, supermarket bagels that are moldy when the bag is opened only a few hours after they are bought. The list goes on and on.

There are some truly good products, but all too often we accept mediocrity. It's time to do away with "almost adequate" and make "good" mean what it says. There's no room for wiggling out by redefining words.

Henry Davis is an independent contractor.