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Technology Stocks : DELL Bear Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rudedog who wrote (1878)	9/7/1998 6:17:00 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 2578

Hi rudedog; The thread needs to be renamed the "JIT Discussion Group". Have you read Quality is Free? It had quite an influence on me as a young engineer, right up there with Soul of a New Machine. As a design engineer, the most important aspect of JIT to me is the ability to improve quality control. Thus waste is reduced. The worst disaster that I have ever seen at an employer happened as a result of batch processing. The manufacturing line produced a printed circuit board (a graphics board.) There was a couple of wires (i.e. engineering change orders = cuts and jumpers) on the board, so engineering laid out new art work. The artwork change was only in a couple of copper layers. No changes to any of the rest of the board design. Even the drill tape stayed the same. The change was so simple, that they went ahead and had 40,000 bare boards (6-layer copper) ordered. The had 10,000 boards stuffed with parts (including a lot of expensive surface mount chips.) Then they tested the result. None of them worked. Called engineering in to find the problem. Turns out that none of the chips had any connections to the power or the ground planes. This was caused by an unintended change to the definition of the internal layer thermal relief shape. So they had to scrap all 40,000 boards. 30,000 bare, and 10,000 fully stuffed. With JIT, the factory would have been testing boards as they came off the line. After the first 10 or so were defective, any line worker would have had the authority (and responsiblity) to shut the entire line down. Engineering would have been called a lot sooner, and only maybe 100 to 500 of those boards would have been stuffed. (I suppose that if the PC board house was operating on JIT they would have had the opportunity to change the artwork before producing all 40,000 boards with the fatal error, as well.) One of the cool things with JIT is that you get to check out the incoming parts before you have used a whole batch of them to make (possibly) defective stuff. I have felt for a long, long time that American industry would do well to increase pay levels for manufacturing engineers. They need to attract the absolute best people for these positions. I think there is some room for improvement at the majority of manufacturing firms. Of course, most problems I've seen in a product were caused by engineering design errors, rather than manufacturing, and I suppose that is why salaries are so much higher in the design end. -- Carl

To: rudedog who wrote (1878)	9/13/1998 12:26:00 PM
From: jbn3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2578

Dog, excuse me if I'm Rude for jumping in here, but you stated: I agree that Dell is only a portion of their manufacturing load. CPQ is a much larger fraction. At one point CPQ took nearly 30% of Intel's output. Although that is no longer the case they are still Intel's largest customer. According to the last IDC numbers I saw, CPQ was still selling more units than DELL, though DELL had increased sales sharply. I think that a fair percentage of CPQ's units are equipped with AMD and Cyrix chips, while all of DELL's are still INTC. I would merely like to make two points: 1. CPQ may NOT be INTC's largest customer any longer; if it is, that situation may be subject to change within the next couple of quarters. (Unfortunately, I don't have the current data to be more explicit. Perhaps someone else does. Then we could estimate what percentage of CPQs units were sold using Cyrix, AMD, or Alpha chips) So I think that DELL should now be buying in very similar quantities; IMO, that would imply similar price concessions. 2. Although INTC may prefer to work with concrete long-term forecasts, and be willing to make price concessions to those companies which are willing to make them, IMO it must also appreciate customers who have demonstrated absolute brand loyalty, such as DELL. Just my $0.02. Thanx, 3.