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This is what you want your supplier to have

This is what you want your supplier to have

This is what nobody tells you about selecting suppliers. Most 70-page audit reports mention it, but almost none treat it as a top-3 decision factor. However, this is absolutely critical when you are assessing a new supplier for your hardware product.

The test lab. It must be good. If it is not, then don't expect the products made by this supplier to be good either. For ODM suppliers, the quality of their test lab may quite literally be a difference between life and death for your product launch.

By saying "good," I mean that the lab should not only be well-equipped, but also well-organized and well-maintained. Expensive equipment alone says nothing. For example, I saw a brand-new Fluke oscilloscope literally buried under a pile of garbage. Guess if their customers were happy with the quality of their manufacturing (no, they were not).

A bad lab turns into slow failure analysis, "cannot reproduce" defects, false passes, late cert surprises, and returns you pay for.

Of course, there may be exceptions to this rule, but you don't want to test it on your product.

What a good lab looks like:

  • Clean benches, labeled equipment, clear ownership
  • Calibration stickers + records (all not expired)
  • ESD discipline (mats, wrist straps, grounded storage)
  • Fixtures that look used weekly, not once per year
  • Logs that exist: test reports, failure analysis notes, sample retention, version control

Red flags I do not ignore:

  • "We do not have time to test, production is busy"
  • New equipment unopened, or old equipment never calibrated
  • Random boards on benches with no labels, dates, or context
  • One "lab guy" ("this is our engineer") who is the only person who can run anything

Quick on-site checklist:

  • Ask for the last 3 failure analyses they completed
  • Ask to see calibration records for critical instruments
  • Ask them to reproduce one known issue, live
  • Ask where golden samples are stored and how they are controlled

A good supplier keeps their lab like a cockpit. If it looks like a storage room, treat it like a warning.

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