Reworking faulty electronic products – a Christmas story

Published Friday 7th December, 2018

Once upon a time in 2016, we were contacted by a very concerned client who needed some urgent help with reworking some faulty electronic products that they'd ordered from the Far East...

While we have many OEM clients that associate us with designing and manufacturing circuit boards for their products, we also have a growing number of enquiries regarding our troubleshooting and electronic rework services.

On this particular occasion, the faulty electronic products that came our way were 32,000 Christmas themed musical biscuit tins which the supplier needed to ship to Marks & Spencer in time for the seasonal rush - not a client you want to keep waiting!

Failure rates and a looming deadline

The problem began when the supplier received their order of over 500,000 of the musical items and the quality team started checking them prior to distribution - where they found a significant failure rate of approximately 10%. While failures in electronic products can certainly happen, this rate translated to more than 50,000 units that were not fit for distribution and sale.

While the products had been ordered in plenty of time, as they weren’t received and checked until mid-October, the supplier faced prohibitive costs if they were to re-order them from the Far East and pay for air-freighting the new shipment to the UK in time for Christmas.

But help was at hand...

Technical reports and a happy ending

When the supplier approached requesting a technical report to submit to the manufacturer, we jumped in to help straight away, starting off with the inspection process.

Our experienced electronics engineers conducted a thorough investigation of the products and their components, and soon identified the manufacturing issue causing the failures. With the problem isolated, we were then able to create a solution to fix the issue and offered the supplier a rework service to recover 35,000 of the faulty biscuit tins.

Due to the time constraints we were under real pressure to deliver, but we had the job all wrapped up in just under 3 weeks, giving the supplier time to distribute the items to Marks & Spencer stores across the UK so they could be on the shelf for December.

Of course this is just one seasonal example of how we can rework faulty electronic products - our services are for life, not just for Christmas!