A one-size-fits-all approach leaves no room for life’s uncertainties.

Certainty has its devotees.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that some prefer deference to authority, as opposed to independently determining a course of action, making responsible decisions on their own and accepting the consequences. It’s so much easier when others call the shots; all one must do is acquire marching orders and execute accordingly. No muss, no fuss. One sleeps through the night unburdened by what-ifs. The shot-callers are the only ones who are sleep-deprived.

“In order for you to recertify in 2023 as our valued supplier-partner, you must complete the attached RFQ, which requests a firm, fixed-price estimate for the following services: flying probe testing; in-circuit testing; boundary scan/JTAG testing; cross-section services; CT scanning services; x-ray inspection and failure analysis services; dye-and-pry services; and reports for all the aforementioned. You will find quantities on the x-axis, with services above listed on the y-axis. Please insert pricing in US dollars in the intersecting cells. Pricing will be valid through December 31, 2023, inclusive, and will be the unchanging basis for awarding all purchase orders for those services throughout 2023. There will be no exceptions, and no revisions allowed, during the applicable period.”

Except: How do you distinguish between the single-board job and the multi-board job? How do you separate the 300-net test from the 5000-net test? What if Engineer A wants this job in 10 working days, while Engineer B needs that job overnight? What happens to cost – and lead times – when a project receives an 11th hour ECO, two days before scheduled shipment? Last year, one failure analysis job for this customer cost $2,500. A second cost $135,000.

How does a pricing matrix capture that much variability? What happens if (crazy, improbable hypothesis, admittedly) a pandemic-induced supply chain delay of key components erases assembly cycle time, leaving a fraction of the quoted lead time for test development and actual testing, over a holiday weekend, when extra time must be paid according to state law? How does one add a Jerk Factor, adding ease/unease of doing business to the calculation?

In real life there are many deviations from script.

Yet people persist in attempting to encapsulate a year’s worth of human inexactitude in one simple spreadsheet for easy, formulaic price selection.

Management craves certainty. Damn them.

Budgets must be written.

Bonuses, and promotions, are rewarded for promoting stability. It’s human nature.

Never mind the built-in instability of 9 to 11% inflation.

This is small cog thinking. Small cogs in big commercial enterprises feed the demands of very big flywheels. Flywheels with pensions.

So much for commercial certainty. A second cohort desiring similar outcomes works for the government, or government-directed programs. That means rules to be followed. No questions asked. Many clipboards, literal and online. Boxes checked. DocuSign NDAs. Two-factor authentication. Third-party administration. Certifications and authentications. EFT details. All to simplify paperwork. And negate the tiresome need to send out each project for quoting. Because. Leaving more time for, well, sending out new matrix RFQs. In quintuplicate. Thus, the flywheel turns.

If someone wants to step up and be authoritative and declare unequivocally, “This is the way things are going to be,” then there will always be a raft of followers predisposed to follow orders. For them, following is the thing. The same Universal Truth applies in government-directed activity. Passivity enables regular taxpayer-funded work hours.

“Wouldn’t it be so much simpler if you could produce a one-time chart listing ICT fixture and program prices, with net counts on the x-axis, and estimated engineering time on the y-axis, and expedite factors on the z-axis? Then we wouldn’t have to bother you once a month for pricing, and our management would have their budget for the year, using your chart as their foundation (stretching our imaginations for a moment to envision bureaucrats brainstorming in 3D)?”

Management loves charts. Damn them again.

Yes, it would be simpler and somehow comforting. So would a single tax rate. As would world peace.

Consider this:

“We understand you offer flying probe test services. What do such services cost?”

Lots of money. If you have to ask, you can’t afford them.

“Seriously, what does this service cost?”

Seriously, to answer your question with any degree of precision, you need to tell me about the parameters of your board. Otherwise, the only answer I can give you is at best an educated guess based on averages and probabilities and hourly rates, which are subject to much change, by countless factors. Inevitably, such vagueness ignites suspicion and launches misunderstandings. Or, to paraphrase Shakespeare, I’ll dispense with a whole lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But the pablum I dispense will make your management happy, filling a box. Knock yourself out.

“Are you competitive?”

Define “competitive.”

Being the lowest cost among three identical competing services.

Nope. And proudly so: in this business, it is a documented fact that you get exactly what you pay for. Sometimes good, hard, and well-deserved. If low price is your sole or primary criterion for awarding business, then this will be a brief conversation. We wish you luck identifying two competing services doing exactly what we do, with technical specificity, at the low price you wish to pay. You’ll need it.

Let market forces teach them. We’re busy. Our time is worth money.

Or this:

An EMS company is informally known in the business as “The Children’s Crusade,” given its penchant for hiring eager college graduates to staff its lower procurement and program management ranks. Those hired possess an abundance of ambitious energy; a consequent willingness to work short, intense bursts of extraordinary hours; and an almost breathtaking lack of technical knowledge of the items they are purchasing, managing, or otherwise administering. A million-dollar test system thus becomes another eight-digit line item on a spreadsheet, below a one-cent nylon washer and above a ceramic capacitor. Click here and in it goes to the shopping cart, squeezed next to the Boeing 777. Discounts for all are available in volume to qualified buyers.

To make matters more interesting, The Children’s Crusade rarely assigns its children’s names to emails, relying instead on disembodied job functions or department responsibilities. Therefore, an email from “Operations” could have its origin in five different sources, each of them anonymous. Purchasing instructions, and technical statements of work (SoWs) are of the cut-and-paste variety. This EMS company thinks this arrangement is a good thing, permitting homogenization of job functions, authority, and low-level responsibility. They also think they are really smart in effectively setting up clerks with college degrees.

Accordingly, the RFQ from them reads like this:

“Please provide a quote for in-circuit test development and testing, using the (incomplete) files provided on our FTP site (login credentials and file password provided in separate email). Please quote fixture and program prices separately. Also please quote a third line item, individual test costs. We wish to reserve the option of having the fixture and program installed on our machine, at our facility, or having our designated supplier retain the fixture and program at their facility with responsibility for ongoing testing, as needed.”

The RFQ continues:

“For test pricing, please quote the following quantities: 1, 230, 253, 688, 759, 2750, 3035.”

These quantities were not made up. They were taken from an actual RFQ. Passed down faithfully, no doubt, from an OEM RFQ.

And finally:

“Please acknowledge receipt of this RFQ and submit your company’s best pricing withing 24 hours of its receipt.”

Children say the darndest things.

To which we as adults respond:

Dear Operations (we strive always to make relations warm and personal), your Request for Quotation is received and acknowledged. Once all data are received, it will take roughly 3 to 5 working days to provide an in-circuit test development quote. Twenty-four-hour turnaround is not possible because many files are missing; first and foremost, usable CAD. The file labeled CAD you provided is missing component placements and, therefore, useless for program quoting purposes. Once a complete set of working files to the correct revision is received, then the quote countdown will start.

Pricing will consist of three elements: Program (fully debugged), fixture, and unit test cost. Additional engineering and support will be billed at an hourly rate. You will have the option of having the fixture and program installed at your site (installation charge separate, at engineering rates), on a configuration-compatible machine to ours; or have the setup remain at our facility for future testing (no installation charge necessary).

With respect to test pricing, we will quote a unit price that is applicable for all quantities. Pricing for one is the same as pricing for 688, or for 3035 for that matter. Test time remains the same, regardless of quantity being tested; therefore, there are no economies-of-scale accruing from larger quantities, and unit time associated with larger quantities may actually be longer in duration given excessive failure rates and their associated troubleshooting time.

We could use this RFQ as a proving ground to test a long-held fantasy of ours: tilt the tester to a 45° angle and see if it runs faster downhill, thus allowing us to pass the savings gravity confers. Who knows, inclined testing could hatch a breakthrough, producing additional savings when one leaps from batches passing that critical inflection point between quantities 230 and 253. From the mouths of babes might emerge wisdom after all. The quest for certainty renews itself with each generation.

Then we wake up. •

Robert Boguski is president of Datest Corp. (datest.com); rboguski@datest.com. His column runs bimonthly.

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