The process of bringing a new electronic product to market has many risks that can affect the final quality of the product. You cannot expose yourself to long delays due to rework of defective products, to an avalanche of bad reviews, or to failures that lead to safety issues. Many manufacturers in Asia won’t be aware of or attentive to these risks, as their goal is to get into production quickly.
Our experience is integrated into your team and we’ll work with you and your manufacturer to take tried-and-tested actions to assure that your product will be compliant, durable & reliable, and of consistent quality by the time it hits the market.
Sofeast’s electronic and quality engineers support your new product launch project every step of the way in this program. We can start helping you during product development, transfer to manufacturing, and/or during mass production.
Any company that is going to launch a new electronic product in China, Vietnam, or India, or that has launched and is struggling with serious issues (and needs to set a more solid base for future orders).
Here are ways we can help you, assuming that product design & development is finished:
- Document your requirements in a specification sheet, and define a test plan, if that’s not already done. It will be used by the manufacturer and by your inspection team as a checklist, and it should be referred to in your contract with your supplier.
- Review your design files against important imperatives (for manufacturing, for quality, etc…).
- Think of potential safety failures, in particular, in more depth, and plan on how to minimize those risks.
- Explain your requirements to the manufacturer, if you feel that’s needed (in case their communication skills and their understanding are poor).
- Collect compliance requirements, and prepare a reliability test plan.
- Audit the assembly factory, and the suppliers of critical components, to qualify their ability to mass-produce at a high quality level.
- Help review and validate the tooling for the enclosure and/or internal parts (see separate program solution for tooling).
- Review of the manufacturer’s risk analysis (FMEA), process control plan, and assembly & testing instructions; we point to the major gaps and suggest improvements.
- Design/make checking fixtures, PCBA functional test stations, etc.
- Plan for pilot runs (to validate processes) and be on-site to follow up on issues and their fixing, to confirm production readiness.
- Develop and gather all the parts of the product safety file (“technical dossier”).
- Have an English-speaking project manager follow up on progress all along, as needed. (Note: extra costs may apply for office work.)
- Once it goes into production, send inspector(s) and report on issues. Keep track of the issues in an Excel file and we can work on corrective actions with the manufacturer.
Once you give us the context of your manufacturing project, we can suggest a Quality Assurance program. We usually discuss it in a phone call.
Then, if you already work with a project manager (PM) from our company, that PM can make sure the plan is effective. If you do not work with one of our PMs, a team in our QA dept. will be responsible for implementing the plan.
Fabien Guassorgues
COO & Quality Assurance Expert
Fabien has 25 years of engineering and operations management experience, mostly in Fortune 500 groups (Safran, Thales, Nortel, and Airbus).
He developed subsystems that ended in cars, fighter jets, 3G base stations, and mobile phones to be used in secured and private networks.
At Sofeast, he works with new clients on setting the right strategy, from design to manufacturing, and coaches the team in providing the right level of assistance. He is often one of the senior management team involved in prototyping projects at the beginning, and then the rest of the team manages the projects.
Andrew Amirnovin
Head of NPD & Quality Assurance Expert
Our head of New Product Development, Andrew Amirnovin, is an electrical and electronics engineer and a reliability & quality expert who previously worked with electrical giants such as Nokia, AT&T, LG, GoPro, and Medtronics.
Andrew is an ASQ-Certified Reliability Engineer and he is our customers’ go-to resource when it comes to building reliability into the products we help develop.
He often gets involved in new QA programs we’re setting up and implementing.
Wayman Z (China)
Electronic Quality Engineer
Wayman has been a member of the Quality Assurance team for 3 years.
Before joining us he spent 2 years at Galanz as a quality engineer following microwave and air conditioner production processes. He gained a great deal of experience in 8 years at an engineering firm working for Cisco, Honeywell, GE, and other large companies, mostly performing process audits, component inspections, and first article inspections.
Evelyn T (Malaysia)
Supplier Quality Engineer
Evelyn is a highly-experienced quality engineer specializing in supplier and manufacturing quality.
Her past experience includes almost 20 years at Dell — first as a process engineer and later in supplier quality engineering. She also worked at Honeywell as a Senior Quality Manager. Over the years she has led supplier improvement projects, trained quality engineering teams, and managed suppliers for key materials and components for these giants.
How much does creating and implementing an electronics QA program cost?
Costs start 40 USD per hour for office work, and 299 USD per man-day for work in factories (to be confirmed once we know where the factory is located as costs can vary based on location).
