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Let's Talk Testing: Are You Getting What You’ve Asked for?

A lot of things are taken for granted nowadays. Even in our everyday lives, we order things, but are we always getting exactly what we’ve ordered? What we’ve paid for? Maybe… hopefully…but maybe not. In the testing world, we call this double-checking “supplier surveillance,” and it can influence and affect anyone and everyone in the printed circuit board and printed circuit assembly supply chain.

In a nutshell, supplier surveillance is a set of steps that you’ve put in place to ensure that you are getting whatever it is that you have asked for. Whether that be a circuit board, a laminate material, some plating bath chemistry, a metal alloy…or whatever. A little bit of testing on the front end, to ensure that you’re receiving what you think you’re receiving, can go a long, long way in providing you and your customer some piece of mind. It’s a small bit of due diligence that can pay off big. A small bit of testing or double-checking that allows you, with confidence, to know that you are getting what you’ve paid for and that a potential product or field return from your customer is not due to your use of poor quality building blocks.

No matter where you are in the supply chain, if you are receiving defective material or product and are not performing any supplier surveillance, then there is a 100% chance that you are passing said defective material/product on to your customer. 

A successful supplier surveillance plan will ensure that you are receiving and then using exactly the materials/products that you want to build the widget you are selling to your customer. Supplier surveillance plans typically incorporate items such as product data sheets and/ or certificates of compliance (CoC) to ensure that the material or product matches what you believe you are receiving. Product data sheets commonly contain information about the features of the material/product as well as chemical, electrical, and/or mechanical properties of the material/product, along with any testing history that may have been performed. Similarly, CoCs typically contain much of the same information but also commonly link the particular material/product to a part number and/or lot number. Also, the CoCs might also include information related to when the material/product was tested and when it might expire, or no longer be suitable for use.

Both the product data sheet and the CoC, and even your own drawing or specification regarding exactly what it is that you want, are important documents when performing supplier surveillance as it gives you the specific details about what your material/product is and is not, or should and should not be. Test plans can be developed around these documents to provide some reassurance that you’re getting what you’ve paid for.

The tests performed as part of your supplier surveillance plan are obviously important, but just as important as the testing is the plan that you’ve developed to assess the risk involved. Knowing your final product, what it is that you deliver to your customer, will allow you to optimize your supplier surveillance strategy to focus on those materials or products that are most critical to your end product’s success. You should understand the factors that most affect the quality of your materials/products. Maybe it’s a raw material in which product data sheets and/or CoCs are the most important pieces of documentation? Maybe it’s a product in which design factors should be scrutinized and investigated? Maybe you’ve purchased from a nonOEM, and the widget could be counterfeit? These are just some of the questions that you might need to investigate to ensure that your final product is exactly what you’ve told your customer it will be.

If you’re not performing supplier surveillance, what happens when your customer does and discovers that they’re not getting what they’ve asked for? Whatever does happen in this case, it probably won’t be something good and if their investigation finds that the culprit of the issue(s) was something that you would have found doing your own due diligence, it’s likely the outcome will be bad for you and/ or your company. They say a penny saved is a penny earned…in the world of supplier surveillance, a few pennies spent testing a couple of samples on the front end, could easily save millions of pennies on the back end.