Made By Monkeys

Outsourcing can be fraught with challenges as the maker of the recalled Thomas the Train recently found out. -- As More Toys Are Recalled, the Trail Ends in China.

From the NYT article: "Many companies have gone to China lured there by low-cost labor and in many ways what happens there is that they end up not only outsourcing production but outsourcing a lot of the design of the products," said M. Eric Johnson, a professor of management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

And who better to talk about the complexities of outsourcing than an engineer who has been-there-and-done that? In an article in Design News Design Engineer Al Mudrow pens a highly compelling, from-the-trenches account of two harried weeks he spent in China ironing out issues with a subcontractor, scouring electronics market for components, dealing with schedule slips and language snafus, and realizing that making the decision to outsource involves a multitude of trade-offs. A cautionary tale for everyone contemplating outsourcing.

You get what you pay for at the Chinese "fake" markets -- these Paul Frank monkey watches and Rolex may approximate the real thing from afar, but they are in fact stunningly cheap knock-offs. But the real trouble begins when critical performance attributes are traded off for low cost, as reported on in the NYT article "US Companies Increase Testing of Chinese Goods."

From the NYT article: "The discovery over the last few months of tainted or defective products from China — including toothpaste, tires, toys and fish — has prompted United States lawmakers to fault companies for compromising quality in their quest for inexpensive imports and higher profits."

That should ring familiar to many engineers, While I was editor of Design News magazine, I talked extensively with engineers who had experience outsourcing their designs to China. Some pointed out that they had trouble getting components to meet the spec in the first place. Many others described a particularly pernicious problem known as "spec drift," whereby a component would initially meet the spec. Then, over time, its quality and performance would gradually fall off. One engineer in the medical industry summed it up this way: "We outsourced to China to get a good price and lead time, but it appears we traded off quality in the process."

Those nasty trade-offs, they'll always get you in the end.

The announcement last month that 46 million Nokia-branded lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries made by Matsushita Battery Industrial could potentially short circuit and overheat was just the latest in a spate of product advisories and recalls of the technology over the past two years.

But it’s not as if Li-ion batteries are at the early point in their life cycle when you would expect these sorts of problems to crop up. Sony invented the technology back in 1990. So why is it failing now?

The theories behind the technology’s recent spotty performance are complex and varied, which makes fixing the problem a perplexing engineering challenge.

In case you've ever wondered how India makes stuff cheaper than we do, apparently they skimp on safety equipment as evidenced by this Sponge-Bob-like hard hat!