What we do at Stanley is put in the contract that the fab house is
responsible for all assemblies that are defective as a direct result of any
screwups at the board house level.  If there is a laminate problem, we
attack the laminate manufacturer, not the board house.  But that has not
happened in years.  However we have had board houses have to eat assemblies
that cost between $15 and $30.  They know going into the contract they will
be responsible for the boards, labor, litigation costs (if any) etc.  

However the boards we do are single sided 12/12 at worst.  We do
electrically test all high volume (>1 million pwb's per year) circuit
boards.  We have found defects that board house should ahve caught.  This
brings up another interesting point.  JUST BECAUSE I TELL YOU TO
ELECTRICALLY TEST A PWB DOES NOT MEAN YOU WILL IF YOU WANT TO SAVE COSTS!
Oh sure you can spout about SPC and the odds of not testing a bad board, but
that is how we caught this board house.

We have a good working relationship with 2 large board houses in Chicago and
one here in Detroit locally.  Haven't changed the three we work with in
years now.  However, more and more people are trying to get us to go
offshore with local stocking in Chicago.  For the single sided stuff I saw
from off shore I was NOT impressed.  Also what guarantees they are not using
slave labor from prison camps or are not acting like NIKE and subcontracting
to people who treat their people worse that dogs?

The best way to avoid the situation is to understand what the contract
specifically calls out for.  We don't electrically test any design that is
single sided and has 20 mil tracks 15 mil spacing, if it is low volume,  I
mean if a board house can't do this they should not be in business.  However
we test ALL of our double sided PWB'S.

As far as the defective transistor arguement/point, yup, we have sued
National and Thompson.  Motorola worked out a deal with us when they changed
stuff.  They at least had the common sense to notify us.

A component vendor/distributor who deals with us knows that is a large
volume of their parts are defective they will either eat the assemblies or
get back charged for the labor to fix the problem.

Again, however, this comes with working for a Fortune 500 company.  I hate
to think what some of you have to put up with because you dont have a
corporate vulture pit (office building full of corporate lawyers).

***************************************************************************
* TechNet mail list is provided as a service by IPC using SmartList v3.05 *
***************************************************************************
* To unsubscribe from this list at any time, send a message to:           *
* [log in to unmask] with <subject: unsubscribe> and no text.        *
***************************************************************************