The Challenge

Return goods materials (RGM)

• The customer’s product testing system was quite slow, only allowing for one product to be tested at a time. This delayed the time to market for the product.
• Untested goods accumulated leading to warehouse storage costs.
• The large workforce resulted in many manual operations, which were prone to errors, leading to reduced productivity.
• Updating the software with new versions took a lot of time and was not consistent.

The customer desired to build a system for classifying returned products for re-entry into the market, minimizing human errors, accelerating time to market, and optimizing labor resources

ShopFloor Control System (SFCS)

• Manual control of the testing process for each product through labeling made the products prone to loss and confusion during the testing process. Customers had to spend additional time rechecking the system, leading to decreased productivity and increased labor costs.
• The system was unable to accurately determine the PASS or FAIL status of a product during the testing process
• The process management system for each product’s testing was not optimized. The customer would incur additional costs to expand the system if production were scaled up

The desire was to build a system that could be easily reused on existing systems, with fast deployment, easy scalability and upgrades, cost reduction, labor optimization, and increased efficiency

The Solution

Developed automation test systems that could handle more products at the same time

Built a new software application to be able to manage and update software/firmware for multiple devices simultaneously to help optimize cost and make time-to-market faster.

Built and deployed a new software application to be able sort RGM products, manage and automatically apply the product life cycle for each kind of product (such as: A-Grade, B-Grade, RB-Grade, S-Grade).

Built a tool of Serial Number Generation to label a new SN for RGM device package before delivering to market.

Built a system to manage inspection processes and query all of the products at the factory (Check status of the product, Initiate product inspection process, determine the testing process for each product, Export reports for each process)

The Result

• Categorized returned products according to clients’ classification criteria
• Reused products, ensuring they are still in working condition for the market, minimizing inventory losses
• Enabled to test 10 products per testing session, reducing the time to market
• Increased revenue without incurring inventory costs.
• Helped the client (NTGR) to save millions of dollars in costs per year, transforming product returns into profit and improving margin.