Apple knows exactly which Foxconn employee screwed up your iPhone

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Apple By Lee Mathews Sep. 5, 2014 2:29 pm
Apple’s manufacturing partners churn out millions of products every month. You’d think that would make it tricky to keep tabs on how a particular iPhone or iPad was assembled, but that’s not the case at all. Apple knows exactly who was responsible for assembling every one of its devices.
It’s no secret the way Apple controls its supply chain, so it’s not exactly a surprise to find out that they can pinpoint a single defect in a single phone or tablet to one specific employee on the assembly line. The point isn’t to place blame or cause an individual employee grief — though with Foxconn’s track record, it’s hard to imagine there not being repercussions.
According to former Apple returns program lead Mark Wilhelm, it’s all part of the company’s “early field failure analysis” (EFFA) plans. When a recently-released device is returned to a Genius Bar, Apple’s response team springs into action. Items are analyzed by the EFFA team and repaired, and fixes are then passed along to manufacturing partners — hopefully keeping a problem that might affect a few hundred iPhone owners from becoming something that pisses off thousands or millions. It’s critical, then, that Apple be able to quantify things as much as possible, and that means knowing who the worker was on which shift at the particular*factory where the problematic product was built.
When the first iPhone launched in 2007, the EFFA had to tackle a problem with touchscreens. It turned out the problem wasn’t with the screen itself. Sweat was actually seeping in through the earpiece, and eventually causing them to short out.
The fix was relatively simple: apply a coating around the area to keep sweat from getting in, information the EFFA team passed on to the manufacturer. Knowing who’s doing what on the production line made deploying the fix that much easier.
Other companies track who does what on the production line, but I wonder if Fruit of the Loom actually knows who messed up sewing the underpants that inspector #27 rejects.



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