Hornby Quality Control ???.Who Is Responsible .

DonnyRailMan said:

Who is responsible for the quality control at Hornby...

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That will be people within the design and manufacturing functions, not readily identifiable to customers. Just send the faulty product back, and have their customer support group deal with it, repair, replace or refund. Do those customer support people begin a 'closed loop' process of reporting systematic failure causes back into design and manufacturing for correction? I hope so

What I believe to be a major contributor to Hornby's problems of this sort is the volume of their product which is purchased by collectors with the 'mint in box' obsession. That product goes into a 'black hole' from which no information is received until at best long after production date, which is way too late. So the scale and range of problems are likely to be underestimated.

(I worked on a similar problem early in my career within a division of a Fortune 100 multinational, and once we began to get access to the customer perception there were a pile of completely unknown significant failure modes to fix. That kept our small manufacturing engineering team run off our feet, identifying root cause of failures and applying changes in manufacturing, packaging and distribution technique to eliminate failures in both current and future product. A most memorable colleague from Oz likened the task to returning Rod Laver's serves with a ping pong bat...)

DonnyRailMan said:

Who is responsible for the quality control at Hornby...

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boxbrownie said:

Obviously no one ...

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While funny as a throwaway line, that cannot be true.


All of what is required to produce a model of correct appearance with a competent working mechanism, quite simply isn't possible without attention to control of conformance to specified applicable standards of all of the research, design, manufacturing and shipment packaging elements, broadly under the heading 'quality assurance' (QA).

That this isn't executed as thoroughly as it might be, is where our discussion begins. It can be performed better, but there's a cost to it, and the UK model railway hobby market is very price sensitive. Having long experience in the field of QA, I had an informal discussion with one of the leading figures in the business about 20 years past, on how to do better. He couldn't see it as an economic proposition at the time; and given his depth of knowledge I have to concede to his opinion. Wish it wasn't so, but there 'tis.

Nigel2001 said:

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The calculation at present is that customers are willing to put up with the issues in return for the current prices.
<SNIP>

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I suppose to add to that; What is assumed by the manufacturers is that modellers are willing to do minor adjustments/reattachments/etc (such as adjusting pickups) when models are recieved if it isn't quite right.

In reality I think we can all agree that we shouldn't need to do this on a new model out of the box (you wouldn't accept it for a new phone or TV after all!), but unless it becomes the norm to simply reject and send-back substandard items, it isn't likely to change. This would then be either rejected by the retailer back to Hornby(/etc) or sold as a 'second' at a discount. It is widely accepted that modellers are 'happy' to deal with these...

Of course as Nigel and 34C says, this would all cost additional money, and likely to lead to even higher prices unfortunately.

I'm not saying that is right, but simply what it is.

If the manufacturer is not getting returns then there is no way they can tell whether they have a problem or not.

The cost of QA and the cost of handling returns are both easy to calculate. So long as the sum of both is below some percentage of sales, then nothing will change.

If QA cost is a lot higher than the cost of handling returns then maybe the QA can be reduced.

Conversely if the cost of handling returns is really high, then maybe some targeted QA could bring that cost down.

The cost which cannot be easily measured is the financial damage to a brand's reputation. If enough people have repeated bad experiences, they will stop buying. I do not even consider products from one brand (not Hornby) because they seem to suffer a lot of failures across a range of items.

David

kristopher1805 said:

...there are different teams at work some more knowledgeable or competent than others....

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I am as sure as one can be as an outside observer with only the end product to look at, that this is or has been a design shop problem with several brands; and in the case of Hornby, the television programmes suggested to me that designers were 'reinventing the wheel' instead of referring to proven successful mechanism design layouts. (OK this was a TV prog. and might have concealed the truth, but most strikingly a Hornby designer appeared not to have access to a 'standards file', specifically in the design of a Scalextric car mechanism.)

Over a decade ago I suggested that Heljan possibly had two teams (or even individuals) researching and tooling their diesel loco bodyshells, as this might account for their then roughly 50/50 'hit to miss' ratio in body shape fidelity to prototype,.as remarked on by customers. Whether or not this surmise was correct, Heljan's practise in adhering to a standard mechanism design layout for their twin bogie drives was a good example of 'how to do it' (and since that time the minimum necessary changes to accomodate their drive in narrow bonnet mid cab prototypes was handled very well as a design process).

What happens in manufacturing and assembly is yet further obscured from us, but my perception is that this continues on a net improvement path overall.

The evidence: I have bought a fair amount of RTR OO, mainly Bachmann, Heljan and Hornby product myself, and seen a quantity of friend's purchases to fit decoders and the like, over the past 22 years, all of it in the 'newly tooled and produced in China' bracket. Progressively over this time there has been much less to do to obtain reliable performance. By about 2010 the need for adjusting/fixing the pick up arrangements and internal circuit on the newly tooled loco introductions was over, and exterior detail fit was generally staying attached, coupler height and wheelsets were in spec. ; such that the models met the description 'ready to run' straight out of the box. Of course my sampling is limited, in that most of it is for items for BR ER and LMR, but the general trend should be alike over a more complete sampling.

There are still flaws that 'should not happen', and my (informed) guess is that much of this relates to the very high staff turnover, especially in the assembly process which majors on short run production batches. The newly trained staff have nowhere to refine and polish their skill set other than in production, and are required to assemble this product for a couple of days, and then something different, ad infinitum. Tough working environment, they earn their corn.