Hi
There has always been several problems with the central repair
shop method. The biggest is lost expertise. When done like this,
only a few people understand a particular module. With people
moving on to other jobs, deaths and other things, sometimes the
needed knowledge gets lost. It iskind of like maintaining a minimum
population of a species.
There is another problem that I have had personal experience with.
When the module it sent back, the test environment isn't the same
as the real one. They find no problem with the module ( sounds like
the car thing doesn't it but this is a different case ). The module
is sent back with the problem still in it. This was from a manufacture
and the same error would occationally happen on the line. At one
point 15% of the units received were experiencing the same problem.
A quick check on serial number showed that most all were returned
for that problem.
It eventually got straightened out but I can tell you that it was
annoying to turn on the computer and find that the chassis was
wired to the hot lead of the power. You'd ask your self how could
such a problem exist without someone at the factory noticing it?
Although this was a specific case, the problem is generic to the
of assuming that any test, other than the one in the real application,
is truely a valid test. The more we depend on the specmenship to
define the test criteria, the greater the risk that things like
black boxes in airplanes will fail.
Things are just getting too complicated and there is thought that
the DEPO concept can keep up with it. My experience has shown that
it just makes the problem harder to deal with and the reaction
time, in case of a problem, to be slowed by red tape.
Dwight
On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, Steve Robertson wrote:
>
> >I know McDonnell-Douglas was testing the same thing for fighter planes.
> >Most of the time they swap boards. They have developed test benches that
> >test the boards. I remember that computers were swapped in the planes and
> >then off you go. How would you survive a disk crash? It's interesting
> >that were haven't yet heard of any computer virus problems with cars and
> >planes.
>
> It's a matter of economics. It's a LOT cheaper to swap the boards in the
> field than to troubleshoot them. Just send the boards to DEPO where they are
> better equiped (skills and tools) to do component level repair.
>
> Steve
>
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Received on Thu Mar 08 2001 - 13:44:07 GMT