Date:
Monday , August 29, 2005
Author:
Keith Dugger
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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ECS Editor's Day 2005

ECS recently invited us to participate in their first Editor’s Day. Of note, ECS answers the SLI call and promises motherboard upgrades without replacing the motherboard itself! Read on to learn all about the “New ECS.”

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The morning was kicked off with a trip to the ECS USA headquarters. This trip provided us with a look into ECS’s operations in the United States and gave us some key information about the facility.

Tour

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The tour included a quick walkthrough of the building. ECS introduced us to each department and the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of USA operations, See See Lo.

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One of the important notes from this part of the tour is the ECS Return Material Authorization (RMA) lab. Each part sent back is thoroughly tested in an attempt to reproduce or fix the problem.

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Security guidelines prevented us from going down on the assembly line and warehouse floor, but we were able to take pictures from the conference room where our briefing took place.

The warehouse includes sections for assembly and testing of all products released from the USA operations.

Briefing

The USA headquarters is 120,000 square feet of which 20,000 is used for office space. The remaining 100,000 square feet encompasses the warehouse and assembly lines. A primary differentiate setting the United States operations apart from the other ECS sites is complete system builds. The USA site is the only site to assemble and ship full systems.

ECS is continually searching for ways to improve the quality of their products. A key point is that for every one board returned, ECS loses the profit margin on 42 additional boards. This is the primary reason for improving quality in all aspects of the build process.

Some key initiatives that help to improve quality:

- Power testing of a board, CPU, memory and cables

-- This “kit” moves to the assembly line as a single unit

-- Lowered failures by 17%

- QA mechanical inspection

- Software check

- Tests of 13% of every pallet prior to shipping

-- 1 unit fails, the entire pallet fails.

The USA site has a capacity of approximately 21,000 complete systems and is currently shipping about 10,000. Out of this production number only 5% result in actual support calls and 1.5% results in an RMA. Out of these system returns, according to ECS, a large percentage is attributed to memory module failure.