Today's Manufacturing Economy and Repairability
I read a disappointing but unsurprising article the other day. It confirmed what we all already know: consumer products are getting worse.
Quality of consumer goods is dropping. Customer complaints are increasing. Dramatically. The article makes the compelling case that the natural merger and acquisition activity inherent in our economy focuses on profit, drives out cost and reduces overall product quality. I would suggest that the drop in quality correlates with another trend in consumer products: a growing inability to repair.
Products that we love -- the ones that are well designed, work reliably, and that we can repair when they inevitably break -- are often brought to market by small, dedicated companies. Companies that understand how the products are used, that apply thoughtful and creative design and engineering, and that produce fantastic products. Not surprisingly, such companies are successful.
And successful companies get bought. Often by conglomerates who know all about building and operating financial portfolios, but little to nothing about consumer products. These companies understand profit, revenue streams and cost management; not use cases or consumer satisfaction. In the consumer products arena, cost management means a couple of things: Reducing BOM (Bill of Materials) cost, reducing cost of production, and reducing cost of maintenance.
Reducing BOM cost for consumer electronics means two things. First, looking for better deals on the components that go into the product, which often lead to cheaper and lower quality components. These cheaper components don't last as long and fail sooner. Second, reducing BOM cost also means updating designs to eliminate components, which often sacrifices functionality. For example, why display error codes and other information to help the consumer figure out a problem, when elimination of that functionality allows use of a cheaper processor with less memory?
Reducing production cost means changing product designs to make assembly and manufacture easier and less expensive. Specifically in the consumer electronics world, it means using less screws to hold a product together and using more plastic, snap-together parts. Screws take time to assemble, while snapping together plastic parts is much faster, less labor intensive and therefore less expensive. Of course, snap together plastic is hard to "unsnap", making repairs difficult.
Reducing cost of maintenance means that the company finds ways to reduce the cost of customer support, product troubleshooting and product return. This makes the process of dealing with a broken appliance very frustrating and often results in the consumer simply throwing it away and getting a replacement. This, of course, exacerbates our world's waste problem.
In terms of revenue, this break-and-replace scenario is very good for a manufacturing business. Instead of spending time and money to support troubleshooting and repair of an existing product, they sell another one. The incentive is to reduce their effort at support and repair, and increase marketing and sales of new product.
We see that there's a strong correlation between a product's repairability and its quality. Products that have higher quality are also usually more repairable, because the producer has incorporated repairability into the product's design. Not only does the product last longer in the first place, it is easier to repair, which in turn allows it to last even longer.
So product quality and repairability is often connected to the basic structure of our manufacturing economy. The drive to reduce cost and grow revenue results in lower quality and unrepairable products. How do we change that structure? How best to evolve our consumer electronics economic structure to improve quality and repairability?
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