Dave,

My answer is "What do you want it to be" or maybe more accurately, "What do
you want to accomplish"?

I view defects as a process or procedure not performed within spec.  I
count them all
as defects if I am going to use the data to track or correct
something.  The benefit of
having data is to use it for root cause/corrective action or tracking a
trend.  If you
don't plan on doing anything about it you don't need to collect any data!!

Assuming you want to do something with it, I think it is important to know
what.  If you
really just want to know how many units were built acceptable to specs, you
can count
any failed unit as one defect.  That will tell you how many were pass and
how many were
fail.

If you want to correct the defective processes/procedures, you need to
count all defects
and determine why a process/procedure is producing an unacceptable result.

In short......if you are looking for first pass yield or throughput, count
failed units.
If you are looking for root cause and corrective action, count all defects.
If you don't plan on doing either, you really don't need any data!!


Good Luck........DT



At 08:49 PM 8/23/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Technetter's,
>
>When reporting defects, do I count all defects individually or do I count
>the number of bad circuits.  For example, if I have a circuit which
>contains 3 defects, do I count this as 3 (for the 3 defects) or 1 (for the
>single, bad circuit).
>
>Thanks in advance for the clarification.
>
>Dave Roesler
>TRI-C Design, Inc.
>
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