Why must we be the only ones in the quality matrix?
08 December 2008
Over the past few months I have returned in this column on many occasions to my increasing lack of faith in our political and economic masters. Meanwhile, in a seemingly unconnected way, a handful of new initiatives for the electronics industry have come in this week that have bought into focus why we could be quite justified in having a persecution complex.
The initiatives in question are the expanded ENEC mark, Intertek’s Quality and Performance Mark (QPM) , and the latest revision of WEEE and RoHS. All of these are featured in this week’s news offering.
All three are quite different. ENEC should ensure that anything that has a plug or a battery is going to be electrically safe. It is a case of European legislators setting the agenda that the rest of the world ultimately has to follow, but in the case of safety then it is something that all countries recognise as important, so not too controversial. More controversial on account of not everyone recognising their value is WEEE and more particularly RoHS, another case of European lead global legislation. The update of that legislation comes before some of the regional equivalents have been finalised and certainly before the original legislation is part of the industry’s instinctive culture.
Intertek’s QPM differs from the other two in that it is voluntary. I’m not sure if a global recession is the perfect timing for this programme. All the indications are that the winners in the battle for consumer attention during these times of fiscal propriety are the low cost outlets. I can’t imagine a typical consumer being swayed by a quality mark from a company that they are unlikely to have heard of. Don’t get me wrong, I think having such a standard is a good thing and the broader its scope the more useful it becomes - a single, global standard that judges a product’s quality would be a very useful guide to consumers aiming to get the balance right between cost and quality. However, the Interlek’s QPM may have limited impact in the immediate future.
But despite my headline, I know that the electronics manufacturing industry is not alone in being at the sharp end of legislation. Indeed, we demand the same level of diligence from component suppliers, who in turn demand the same assurances from their materials suppliers. Moving the other way along the food chain then OEM customers, retailers and even end consumers now have legal responsibilities. Anything that can be measured can be conveniently legislated for (or against)… or limited, or banned. In fact one of the areas which caused most confusion (some genuine confusion and some confusion out of ‘convenience’) with RoHS was determining the quantities of the named substances in a finished assembly – something that could not be measured.
Every industry is the same - legislated up to the eyeballs. However, in the interests of public safety, consumer confidence and our own business interests it is something that most of us would agree is mostly a good thing for most of the time.
So lets go back to the opening paragraph. Should we feel persecuted? Probably not – but what about that opening sentence? While the rest of life continues to struggle manfully through the swamp of legislation, what of the people who are largely responsible for making that legislation – the bureaucrats and politicians? What governs them? This is not about finding ways of making them feel the pain that they create for everyone else. I am sure that there are endless procedures to make sure that standards of behaviour, faultless expenses claims and other such trivialities are maintained. If any of these is breached then there is a host of hugely expensive review processes that can wheeled out to find out that nobody did anything wrong but that another review should be conducted to look at the way that things are done to make sure that nobody does anything wrong in the future. It is a self-serving farce.
Personally I am of the old school in such matters. I don’t read the gossip in the newspapers because I am not interested. If a politician is caught with trousers down or skirt up it is of no consequence to me as long as they are doing the job right. And this comes round to my point – where are the ‘quality’ standards for these people. In the case of politicians (although not bureaucrats) you could argue that a democratic society will vote out the bad ones, but this is not, in practice, the case. A government can be popular for winning a war or having good fiscal control, which can overcome failings in health care or industry, and the net result is that the government is re-elected. I don’t think this is good enough.
In electronics are we allowed to manufacture phones that make calls but keep failing if we try to send text messages? Or are automotive manufacturers allowed to make cars with great acceleration but dodgy brakes? Of course not – quality is now an inherent part of industry culture and there are endless quality matrices to show that companies individually and collectively meet performance standards. Isn’t it about time that politicians did the same? A simple outline at the beginning of their term in office saying what their targets were and an honest assessment at the end of it as to how well they did. And a bit like making a continuous measurement of defects per million in a factory, anything that fell below a certain level at any time would be cause for alarm. Sadly this falls down because you need to have trust in the reported figures and I know I am not the only one too cynical to give politicians this level of trust.
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