Too Early for Christmas Inspection? (E&E)

The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas typically accounts for approximately 20% of total annual retail sales in the US. If you consider only consumer electronics, this number rises to 30%.

It’s time to pack and ship your E&E goods. You are excited by the prospect of the seasonal winter spike. The hard work is done and all that’s left is the customary preshipment inspection (PSI).

After all, you would hate to ship defective goods. Your brand reputation would suffer, as would your bottom line. What about recalls or even lawsuits stemming from dangerous products with critical defects?

Suddenly, you get a call from the person conducting the PSI. Your worst fears have come true. A large portion of your stock is defective and the winter spike is looking more like a Christmas nightmare.

It might sound dramatic, this scenario is more common than expected. The fact of that matter is you cannot afford to wait until the pre-shipment phase to inspect your consumer electronics. To ensure that goods are meeting quality specifications, Third-party Inspectors (TPIs) can provide various inspection services in addition to Pre-shipment Inspection (PSIs).

Here are 3 of the most common:

1. Raw Material Incoming Check – An inspection carried out before production even begins, which focuses on whether raw materials are meeting quality specifications.
2. Initial Production Check (IPI) - Conducted when 10-20% of your inventory has been produced. This helps verify first run quality requirements.
3. During Production Check (DUPRO) - Typically carried out when goods production is at 40-50% in order to ensure that quality benchmarks continue to be met.

With these types of inspection in mind, let’s focus on a few common defects found in consumer electronics during product inspections and how they can be rectified or avoided.

Scratches and Cracks

Nobody wants to buy a smartphone or laptop that is scratched or cracked, especially if it comes with a premium price tag. Many consumers buy these goods as status symbols, and they wouldn’t want people to mistake their new phone for a secondhand device.

DUPROs can minimize the risk and costs associated with installing new screens as these blemishes commonly occur somewhere between the middle and the end of the production cycle. A TPI can isolate the exact point in the supply chain where the blemish has been introduced and recommend corrective measures.

Low-Quality Raw Materials

It’s absolutely crucial that you start strong. Before production even begins, you need to have to the right raw materials, without which a whole host of defects is likely if not inevitable.

Drones, for example, need to be lightweight in order to cruise at high altitudes. Your customers will be incredibly unsatisfied if their drones fall to the ground from the 2nd floor of a building. Certain polymers and metals, however, are too heavy to allow users to fly their drones with ease.

TPIs can inspect your raw materials, ensuring they meet quality benchmarks before production even begins, which allows you to streamline production. In fact, the right inspection agency can tap into their vast network of suppliers to help you source materials that will enable you to streamline production.

Unreliable Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Radio Signals

Everyone is going wireless and it’s obvious why: wires are annoying, and messy.

Imagine that you manufacture or sell Bluetooth headphones. It goes without saying that the Bluetooth functionality is one of the biggest advantages of your product. However, what if the connection between various devices and your Bluetooth headset kept getting cut off?

In this age of online reviews and social media, word would spread and your brand reputation would be affected. It is quite possible that your low quality model could also affect the sales of other non-defective models in your product catalog.

This defect has also been observed in remote controlled airplanes and cars that rely on radio signals, as well as Smart TVs that rely on Wi-Fi.

Faulty Wiring and Unsafe Batteries

If you thought the three types of defects mentioned above were concerning, imagine a defect so serious it endangers the safety, perhaps even the lives, of your consumers.

Let’s say that you produce or sell robotic stuffed puppies. If you fail to discover exposed wires popping out of the tail of the toy, this could lead to a child receiving an electric shock. If you’re lucky, the parents will either boycott your brand for good or request a refund. However, they may file a lawsuit in court, especially if this has longterm or even fatal consequences for their child.

Over the years we’ve also seen safety issues with batteries, both in laptops and phones. In this case, IPIs and DUPROs can help you determine whether this is an issue with the AC-DC converter, the raw materials used for the battery, or if the defect has taken shape at another point in the manufacturing process.

Even if critically defective goods don’t end up in the hands of consumers, you don’t want to discover this quality issue right before you are scheduled to roll out your winter goods. You could fail to capitalize on part of the Christmas boom if not the entire holiday period.

Ensuring that your E&E goods are free of defects can be a challenging and frustrating process. With its inspection services, InSpec by BV is perfectly positioned to help get your consumer electronics to market ahead of the upcoming winter spike.