Motorola Boynton Beach pager manufacturing

The zero-rework story. Manager brings PCB production from Singapore to Florida, designs the plant for zero rework, and the engineers deliver near-zero rework by fixing the process rather than building a repair area. Tom's prototype for the "self-fulfilling prophecy" argument about defect tolerance.

There are some great stories about taking the risk and making it work. In the electronics manufacturing sector, in 1990 it was well known that you had to have four percent rework on all your printed circuit boards. If you built a printed circuit board plant anywhere in the world, you would have a repair area that could handle four percent repairs. It's a valuable board when you finished it, and if it doesn't work when you burn it in, you go in there and figure out what it is and have someone resolder and repair it.

Around 1989-1990, Motorola brought pager manufacturing back from Singapore to Boynton Beach, automated the process, cut turnaround from six weeks to one-to-two weeks, and — by eliminating the planned 5% repair area — drove defects to zero. Used to illustrate the zero-defects principle and how repair-area sizing defines engineering tolerance for defects.

There's another story on maintenance. Did I tell you about Motorola in Boynton Beach, Florida? Around 1989 or 1990, Congress instituted the National Quality Award — we'll talk later about that award, given by the Department of Commerce to some of the best managed companies in the country in terms of product quality. Motorola was one of the first companies to win it. They had a big success story with pagers. We still have pagers — doctors use them — but they used to be much more prevalent before cell phones.

Motorola's late-1980s decision to reshore pager assembly from Asia to Florida, combined with eliminating the rework area, drove process improvement and pioneered six sigma practice. Used to teach that built-in rework capacity becomes a self-fulfilling defect rate.

Let me tell you a story about pagers. Back around 1990, pagers — there had been pagers back in the 1980s, but that business initially got sent to Asia. In 1990 or so, 1989, Motorola was very innovative. Down in Boynton Beach, Florida, they decided to bring the pagers back to manufacture them, assemble them in the United States. Today, I'm sure pagers are all done on software on a chip, but chips weren't as powerful back then. They weren't as inexpensive 25 years ago. There were like four or five components, because every pager has to have a different frequency that's being paged.