Olivia, Now you have my attention, for what it's worth. Exactamundo on the first question and on many others. This is exactly what I preach as a company wide philosophy and reality realized on all other team levels. Certainly, a quality champion can be very useful in the role you are describing and the clearly defined responsibilities emination from it. My current consulting contract has me responsible for first saving some asses that are, and have never been, manufacturing types let alone DFM/CE types. With my creative R&D group, all eager to get some product to work without C clamps, I have formed a little DFM/CE team as I act as design, process, manufacturing, and quality engineer together with my supplier counterparts. In less than a month, we have redesigned the infamous C clamp board, qualified a supplier to fab it, let a contract with a clearly defined master drawing and acceptance specifications, and sent a package to be built within 10 days. The supplier found very little up front resulting from a thorough DFM critique, so the board was entered into production is one day after receipt of order with concurrently agreed upon design and process changes to ensure quality product. Additionally, in light of serious concerns about quality and reliability issues concerning ceramic BGA's, we have narrowed our search for an assembly capability to do the builds of the first prototypes within 10 days as well. All this will have been done withing 60 days of starting our formative quality program using DFM/CE. This is not blowing my horn. It is a salute to a quality system, never having existed here before, comprised of some of the most creative folks I've worked with in some time and with a desire to get this damn job done right for a change. It also a tribute to all you folks who have given me positive, tremendous input as well as those in our chosen board house and prospective assembly capabilities - like big Steve Gregory. This has been, and will continue to be, a concurrent event involving so many folks around the world. It also points to your needs as expressed in your preliminary outline while seeking your new quality engineer/champion. I wish you well. More importantly, I wish your company and new engineer well and hope you are as fortunate as I when it comes to continuous process improvement. Earl Moon --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Technet Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8d To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet To temporarily halt delivery of Technet send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL To receive ONE mailing per day of all the posts: send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet Digest Search previous postings at: www.ipc.org > On-Line Resources & Databases > E-mail Archives Please visit IPC web site (http://www.ipc.org/html/forum.htm) for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5315 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------