J M Woodgate BSc(Eng) CEng MIET MIEEE FAES
J M Woodgate and Associates, Rayleigh, England
A short history of a half-million dollar loss
April 2 2013
From: Compliance (JH)
To: MJ54 Team Leader (BB)
Subject: MJ54 tests
Not good news. Model for testing (MFT) failed several EMC tests, and there are safety issues as well. Details in a following message. Can we discuss?
May 30 2013
From: BB
To: JH
Subject: MJ54 tests
cc: Manager, R&D
I regret the delay in our discussion due to our incompatible schedules.
Your proposals for MJ54 are simply unacceptable; a $5 on-cost and a redesign of the PC board and enclosure to accommodate the larger EMI filter compromise both the costing and the time-scale already submitted to Marketing and approved. In addition, the bandwidth reserve of stage 1 has been reduced to such an extent that conformity with specification cannot be assured in production.
July 31 2013
From: Manager, Compliance
To: Manager, R&D
Subject: MJ54
After investigation, I confirm that the measures requested by JH are fully justified and essential. I also consider it most regrettable that both JH and BB are under suspension as a result of an altercation admittedly instigated by BB.
September 29 2013
From: VP Marketing
To: VP R&D
cc: President
Subject: MJ54
The increased cost and revised time-scale that you have submitted make the product unviable. In addition, our original request to include BGQQ compatibility if possible, which you declined to fulfil, is no longer an option. Acme and two other competitors now have products with full BGQQ compatibility at prices 10% lower than your original costing indicated.
Could this happen to you? It’s happened many times in the past, and there are still organizations that haven’t heeded the lesson.
Eliminate conflict
This is the principle which guides us to the way to avoid such disasters. There isn’t just one conflict, there are many:
- conflict on design; changes necessary to attain EMC (and/or safety) compliance can easily compromise the achievement of specification compliance;
- conflict on costing; imposing changes at a late stage attracts development re-work costs and often a significant increase in product cost;
- conflict over delay; with ever-decreasing product life-times, even in the professional product field (consider oscilloscopes, for example), scheduled annual product portfolio reviews by large distributors and agents, increasing demands for interoperability (often achievable at very marginal cost by the use of newly-developed devices which integrate many functions in a single package), any significant delay threatens product viability;
- interpersonal conflict; doubt may easily grow, through frustration, and even be fuelled by managerial questioning or disapproval, that some part of the compliance-related critique is unjustified. This conflict can be between designer and compliance engineer or between design engineer and design management (you didn’t give me enough training/time/test equipment/support, or all of them), and very often both occur.
Resolution without (much) revolution
The way to remove conflict is to reassign responsibilities, but that requires preliminary steps. First, design engineers need to be trained to take EMC (and safety) into account at the design stage. It isn’t that difficult to apply good EMC (and safety) design principles, once you are trained to know what they are. Equally, it’s clearly impossible to apply them, except by pure chance, if you don’t know what they are.
It’s not expected that designers should of necessity become highly expert (some will), but they can become sufficiently expert to function correctly, with support from the compliance engineers during development. The latter must know, and pass on to the designers as and when there is a ‘need to know’, the constantly-changing details of applicable standards and regulations and, where necessary, the intricacies of testing methods, whether carried out in-house or at a test laboratory.
In order to train the designers and keep them up to date, they must have ready access to the relevant EMC (and safety) standards, and the relevant legal regulations for the intended market as well. Permitting access to the standards only to Compliance personnel, or keeping the standards and regulations as hard copies in the R&D Manager’s filing cabinets, is clearly unsatisfactory, even idiotic – what possible use are they in there? The designers who should know them are being kept as much in the dark as the standards are!
It would, of course, be better if all standards, as opposed to only some, were available free of charge, but we haven’t evolved far enough for that yet. Even so, some standards (mainly European) are likely to be available at a very wide range of prices, so ‘shop around’ is the rule, and in some countries, national library services offer free access (but you may have to ask, and ask the right office).
When training and access are in place, the internal responsibility for compliance should rest with R&D. In other words, the MFT handed to Compliance shall not be expected to fail. Note ‘shall’, but ‘shall be expected to pass’ is a step too far: EMC would be an exact science only if we could, in general, handle functions of several hundred variables with precision. ( An MFT, however, may in some simple cases be expected with more confidence to pass safety tests.) Compliance, of course, retains external responsibility, i.e. responsibility for ensuring that the manufactured product continues to satisfy all regulatory requirements, standards related to regulations and non-mandatory standards which buyers nevertheless expect to be applied (such as for interoperability), in the markets in which it is exposed.
These changes are not going to happen, no matter how enlightened the engineers and their line managers become, until senior management is committed. Senior management must recognize the logic underlying the proposed system, abandoning traditional ideas, be convinced of its advantages and give it full support. Advantages that result from conflict resolution include:
- reduction of development costs by eliminating or reducing revisions;
- reduction of development time;
- increased confidence in design by eliminating ‘fixes’ introduced under pressure.
The revised system has profound effects; costs now include necessary EMC and safety measures, development time is not compromised by the need for complex re-working and the enclosure will be big enough to contain all the parts, even that over-sized EMI filter. Finally, interpersonal conflict has been overcome to such an extent that BB and JH are to be married. However, it has not been ruled out that future discussions, not about EMC, may include flying crockery rather than 50 ohm BNC terminations.
