Whoops! How Much Can We Mess Up?

As we all know from our cracked cellphone screens, technology isn’t perfect. It takes a lot of work for any company to get a product to you in one piece. This is especially true for technology companies whereas the parts and pieces to one product can be in the hundreds or thousands.

But unlike this sphere, nothing is perfect.

In fact, every company makes mistakes. It is often known as ‘dead-on-arrival’ or DOA. Quite frankly, it cannot be completely prevented.  Companies must plan and decide on how much error is accepted and what can it handle. Many larger companies use six sigma as a tool for controlling production errors. In fact the target is less than 0.00034%. This sounds extreme at first but it is important to keep in mind errors can destroy a company’s operation. It also keeps the product from getting to the hands of the customer.

When it comes to manufacturing, engineers utilize an error budget. An error budget is a tool to assist in design. In most operations it is used to predict part accuracy. 

In six sigma the end result depends on the companies operation and the complexity of the product. If there are too many errors, the company may need to shift to a new manufacturing process. While in error budgeting engineers must decide on which errors they can quantify and correct.

In the end, either way, nothing is perfect. But we can get very close.

Innovation Is Not Always a Product

The Præcis Blog – Damage During Freight

Believe it or not, accidents, miscalculations, misinterpretations, and unpredicted situations happen frequently in the technology and manufacturing realm, even if you never see them.

Damage From Imperfect Planning

In the image above there is damage that occurred during the freight shipment of this device. It weights nearly half a ton. As a result, during transportation, too much weight was concentrated in too few areas, resulting in damage.

The pinnacle of technology is innovation. Coming up with new ideas is the best way to generate solutions. In this case, an innovative idea was passed to an engineer who then designed a newer pallet that can support over a ton of weight.

New Pallet Design

Without creative thinking and skillful execution, our technology world would be missing countless critical devices.. If any process between conception and delivery goes wrong in technology manufacturing, then the end product cannot be sold and made use of to better the tech industry.

Precision Engineering is Everywhere

Technology; it’s omnipresent. We use complex tools daily, but inherently forget how much time, energy, and design goes into each new high-technology product, which changes the way we live.

There are many people, and stories, behind every part of your phone, laptop, or car. Engineers, visionaries, programmers, artists, technicians, metal workers, and more spend countless hours designing, optimizing, and building each part, subsystem, and product.

We never think about certain parts, such as a cellphone camera lens, as a challenge to create.

In reality, however, it took a person to design the lens size, another person to replicate this design in CAD software, an ultra-precision engineer to mill the mold for the lens, and ultra-precision temperature control system to get a precise cut to the angstrom level for all eight million reincarnations of the lens.

This lens is but one small part of the cell phone.