On 22 Oct 2004 06:33:05 -0700, Mary Hinge wrote:



15 years ago you wouldn't have found a PCB in a car engine compartment

Yes you would, if you know were to look.



A PCB in a harsh environment not necessarily a problem provided
sufficient care is taken in 'hardening' it.

Its got little to do with Hardening or environment
more with crap by design.


Also a modern
non-condensing boiler will have most of the additional components you
listed.

This was related to insuring older boilers,
if you had read all the thread !


So that's you sussed then ;o)

Females ;-(

"raden" wrote in message
...
In message , G&M
writes

"raden" wrote in message
...
Usually the microprocessors last forever - it's the thrystors or
triacs
driving the load that go pop.

Not even close ...

Really ? Look at the standard SEMI MTBF charts then.

When you spend your days repairing boiler PCBs, you don't need to look
at charts to tell you the faults.

as I said .. in the real world

So what parts do you find die most often ? And is the information fed
back
to the manufacturers to stop them carrying on using a faulty design ?

You are joking, I take it

Of course they know the design faults

If they do and have an ISO9001 certificate then report them !!

In message , G&M
writes

"raden" wrote in message
...
In message , G&M
writes

"raden" wrote in message
...
Usually the microprocessors last forever - it's the thrystors or
triacs
driving the load that go pop.

Not even close ...

Really ? Look at the standard SEMI MTBF charts then.

When you spend your days repairing boiler PCBs, you don't need to look
at charts to tell you the faults.

as I said .. in the real world

So what parts do you find die most often ? And is the information fed
back
to the manufacturers to stop them carrying on using a faulty design ?

You are joking, I take it

Of course they know the design faults

If they do and have an ISO9001 certificate then report them !!

Do I look stupid ?

(rhetorical question,, that)

--
geoff

In article ,
"G&M" writes:

"raden" wrote in message
...

Of course they know the design faults

If they do and have an ISO9001 certificate then report them !!

ISO9001 does not require that they fix design faults,
unless they were silly enough to say that they would
do so in their Quality procedures.

--
Andrew Gabriel
Consultant Software Engineer

"G&M" wrote
| Of course they know the design faults
| If they do and have an ISO9001 certificate then report them !!

But if they changed the design their failure rate would drop below what is
specified in their quality manual ...

Owain

On 23 Oct 2004 21:20:14 GMT, (Andrew
Gabriel) wrote:

In article ,
"G&M" writes:

"raden" wrote in message
...

Of course they know the design faults

If they do and have an ISO9001 certificate then report them !!

ISO9001 does not require that they fix design faults,
unless they were silly enough to say that they would
do so in their Quality procedures.

Thus is the difference in meaning of the word "quality".

It doesn't mean that anything is any good, just a measure of whether
you do what you say you are going to do.

Quality managers revel in this stuff and talk about "delighting" their
customers. This has always concerned me.



..andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

Andy Hall wrote:

Quality managers revel in this stuff and talk about "delighting" their
customers. This has always concerned me.

It should!!

As one of the unhappy people saddled with writing and agreeing the
BS9000 crap, I KNOW that a BS/ISO9000 quality standard is not worth the
hot air and paper that surrounds it. It was originally set up as a MIL
spec to provide traceability for the US space program, but proved too
expensive to continue without being made toothless. Reliable products
stem from a "won't fail" philosophy which pervades the whole design and
manufacturing process. The Japanese generally have this, to some extent
the Germans also, but they don't start from an ISO9000 specification and
hope to achieve it, they design the product and it will normally
automatically pass any 9000 series requirements. Guess whose products
have the best general track records?! (AND customer satisfaction). The
Chinese are coming up fast. The better design and build operators can
equal almost anything the West can do, reliably and much, much cheaper.
I've seen a few large companies which have this philosophy in the US and
the UK, but most of them have now ceased manufacturing their own
products and buy in to their own specifications which are much higher
than 9000. A lot of small companies locally who make a good product are
finding that they must have ISO9000 certification to sell the product
and the paper work + labour costs are putting them out of business. The
business then goes offshore, never to return!

The most damning inditement of the whole QA process was the comment by
a MOD QA man who said to me "When did you last see a military product
which worked correctly!"

I think I'd consider a condensing boiler if the Japanese built them,
until then, it's far cheaper to keep my reliable piece of cast iron.


Regards
Capitol

In message , Andy Wade
wrote

This was also about the time when the motor industry realised that if
they would have to take EMC RF immunity issues seriously.

Some of the industry still couldn't care a damn. Many people with
terrestrial digital television know that certain cars will kill their
reception when driven close by. In my experience, and ignoring the
poorly maintain ten year old cars, the main culprits appear to be new
large people carriers bearing a far eastern manufacturers name .


--
Alan

"Capitol" wrote in message
...


Andy Hall wrote:

Quality managers revel in this stuff and talk about "delighting" their
customers. This has always concerned me.

It should!!

As one of the unhappy people saddled with writing and agreeing the
BS9000 crap, I KNOW that a BS/ISO9000 quality standard is not worth the
hot air and paper that surrounds it. It was originally set up as a MIL
spec to provide traceability for the US space program, but proved too
expensive to continue without being made toothless. Reliable products
stem from a "won't fail" philosophy which pervades the whole design and
manufacturing process. The Japanese generally have this, to some extent
the Germans also, but they don't start from an ISO9000 specification and
hope to achieve it, they design the product and it will normally
automatically pass any 9000 series requirements. Guess whose products
have the best general track records?! (AND customer satisfaction). The
Chinese are coming up fast.

They do make those wonderful battery drills with fab price /performance

The better design and build operators can
equal almost anything the West can do, reliably and much, much cheaper.
I've seen a few large companies which have this philosophy in the US and
the UK, but most of them have now ceased manufacturing their own
products and buy in to their own specifications which are much higher
than 9000. A lot of small companies locally who make a good product are
finding that they must have ISO9000 certification to sell the product
and the paper work + labour costs are putting them out of business. The
business then goes offshore, never to return!

The most damning inditement of the whole QA process was the comment by
a MOD QA man who said to me "When did you last see a military product
which worked correctly!"

I think I'd consider a condensing boiler if the Japanese built them,
until then, it's far cheaper to keep my reliable piece of cast iron.

The Japs do make em. The Microgen will be made in Japan.

In article ,
Capitol writes:


Andy Hall wrote:

Quality managers revel in this stuff and talk about "delighting" their
customers. This has always concerned me.

It should!!

As one of the unhappy people saddled with writing and agreeing the
BS9000 crap, I KNOW that a BS/ISO9000 quality standard is not worth the
hot air and paper that surrounds it.

I'm not going to try and defend it, but it is completely misunderstood.
Getting certified is about having procedures in place, and documented
and followed. Well, just about every company has procedures in place
which amounts to what it does in its day-to-day work. All that's
normally required is that these be documented. You can document that
you chuck all customer complaints in the waste bin, don't answer the
phone until at least 25 rings, don't pay suppliers for 180 days, whatever...
Just make sure you stick to it and keep enough records to show this,
and you can become ISO certified. That doesn't have to cost a fortune.

What I often see companies doing is hiring in a Quality Consultant
(that's Quality as a noun, definately not an adjective as you'll see).
What turns up is a middle manager who lost his job on the early 1990's,
and discovered he could sell himself as a Quality Consultant, because
even though he had no clue what that was, neither did any of his clients.
Now as a consultant, his primary task is to make his job last as long
as possible. That in itself is clearly expensive to the company, but
the ultimate aim is to persuade the company that quality is an ongoing
thing (which is true) so they'll need to retain his services for the
forseeable future (which is pointless as he's clueless, but so are
they). Now he needs to be seen to be doing something, so he will start
going round the company and interfering (more cost), changing processes
so management can see he's having an effect. Sometimes the consultant
is actually so completely clueless about getting certified, that this
stage just goes on forever, with the company getting more tangled up
in pointless process, whilst the consultant keeps claiming the company
is not yet ready. Other times, the consultant might actually manage
to get certification.

If you want to obtain ISO qualification, start by documenting what
you already do, without changing anything. This is a good time to look
at what you documented to see if there's anything silly (there often
is) and think about fixing that, but it's not normally required that
you turn the company upside down by changing just about all processes.
If you are aiming to improve the quality of some aspect of your
company, then you can tackle it at this stage. The other thing you
need to do is to keep sufficient records to later show that you are
keeping to the procedures you documented.

If you are interested in working with other companies who are ISO
certified, then the certificate itself is worthless. What you need
to do is have a read of their Quality Manual, so you can check what
it says about how long they take to pay their suppliers, or whatever
aspects are particularly relevant to you.

It was originally set up as a MIL
spec to provide traceability for the US space program, but proved too

My recollection when I first came across it (BS5750 at the time), was
that it came out of the GPO. This later morphed into the ISO9000 series.
Military work had its own quite separate standards from what I recall.

--
Andrew Gabriel

Andy Wade wrote:

I think he was getting mixed up with the old BS 9000 series
of standards for 'electronic components of assessed quality', which is
(was) something else entirely, now subsumed into CECC, AFAIK. The
series of quality standards that we now know as BS EN ISO 9000
previously existed separately as BS 5750, EN 29000 and ISO 9000.

As one of the people who wrote a lot of them, I can assure you that the
GPO, BS and the MIL standards were merged and evolved via CECC etc into
ISO9000. The GPO were not at all happy, as their quality standards were
much higher but their management was instructed to go along with the
changes. Later, the MOD was forced to give up it's own AID inspectors
and QA. The net effect was to give manufacturers the ability to produce
crap and claim that it was a satisfactory product because the pieces of
paper said so. The engineers were told that designing a product which
would test out as reliable was not cost effective, thus testing was
unnecessary, hence another of the contributory factors to manufacturing
decline? The process then grew like "Topsy" and was applied to all
businesses whether it was necessary or not. Does this remind you of
building regulations, house sellers packs and the National Curriculum?!!
IME ISO 9000 is not worth the cost, hot air and paper which surrounds
it. I note that IME no customer uses it as a standard criteria for
restaurants!! I wonder why?

Regards
Capitol

In message , Capitol
wrote


As one of the people who wrote a lot of them, I can assure you
that the GPO, BS and the MIL standards were merged and evolved via
CECC etc into ISO9000. The GPO were not at all happy, as their quality
standards were much higher but their management was instructed to go
along with the changes. Later, the MOD was forced to give up it's own
AID inspectors and QA. The net effect was to give manufacturers the
ability to produce crap and claim that it was a satisfactory product
because the pieces of paper said so.

There was also the problem with electronics where major foreign
manufactures didn't bother with 'British' standard as they had other
standards that the majority of customers would accept.
--
Alan

Alan wrote:
There was also the problem with electronics where major foreign
manufactures didn't bother with 'British' standard as they had other
standards that the majority of customers would accept.

That's understandable as the average BS was the lowest standard that
all the manufacturers could agree on. IME The only BSs which were of any
real value and that you could have confidence in, were those for
aircraft equipment. There may have been others, but I never worked on
them. The flammability standards were set by the US, IIRC as UL was
controlled by the insurance companies who reasonably enough wanted to
reduce their risks. VDE also had some good standards.

Regards
Capitol