Close

Extremely excited to enter a new stage of this challenge -- Conceptual designs/ideation

A project log for 2020 HDP Dream Team: Field Ready

The 2020 HDP Dream Teams are participating in a two month engineering sprint to address their nonprofit partner. Follow their journey here.

guptamguptam 07/13/2020 at 15:421 Comment

Hello everyone! For today's update, we have some exciting ideas to share with you all. We have just entered the stage of "Concept Design" where each of us brainstorm different unique ideas for labeling and tracking systems integrated with Quality Control!

Here are some pictures of the ideation process:

I am extremely excited and already loving working with Tom and Antonio on this process of ideation. We get to brainstorm and discuss ideas from the humanitarian aid and user-perspective lens, which helps us evaluate various ideas based on those conditions ! 

Please stay tuned for more updates as we progress in this stage ! And, as always, we welcome suggestions/advices on any piece you think we would need suggestions for. 

Discussions

Enceladus wrote 07/14/2020 at 06:52 point

This is great work and sounds like you guys are having fun doing it. It is exciting to be making such an important contribution to humanity.

Some thoughts:

I was a bit worried to see Google Forms on there, even as an idea. You could just say "forms". :) Please do not use Google. When the hackaday announcement of this challenge came out someone commented that they could only imagine a spreadsheet as the solution and I rolled my eyes and thought to myself "at least they didn't say Google Forms". :)

"Why don't we create an App for Field Ready?" -- yes. This is the appropriate course.

In terms of usability, In the orange 'User' user story I see an extra step for selecting product before entering the barcode, which seems redundant.

It doesn't seem clear from the document but barcodes should include a serialized id and not just a product type. This allows you to match up individual defects with batches and your own in-house QA/QC for that product. You can then follow the lifecycle and immediately see the problem with almost no effort.

Additionally, feedback for an item, whether it be a form or an email, should be attached and associated with that product in the database. Loose emails lose details (over time).

At it's core, QA/QC is nothing more than checklists. A list of tests or observations, the expected result, and did it pass or fail. They are quick to perform and when done right, are the very things a manufacturer is checking in their head during production anyway. The magic comes when all of these checklists are performed as a matter of course during the manufacturing to a proper database, and you can perform statistical analysis or complaint tracking and tracing on individual batches, individual products, individual inspectors, and individual assemblers/machinery.

That last part is important; don't overlook keeping track of which tools are used to do the manufacture as well. Maybe a certain drill is not perfectly perpendicular with the vector of action, causing a slight defect in the units that were made with that drill. You will never find the cause of such a defect without tool tracing as well.

The same goes for the importance of tracking incoming materials. Especially when materials can be sourced from many different random places. QC must be performed on materials, and batches of materials and their sources should be diligently tracked as well.

Finding a defect is one thing. Figuring out what caused it is another. Having data at each step makes that inquery take sometimes minutes instead of months or years. Without proper data at each step of the way, in some cases you may never find the true cause of a defect.

I'll add one more thought: QA/QC checklists can and should perform double duty as the instructions/documentation for a manufacture process. It should not be thought of as an "extra" step, but rather the steps themselves.

  Are you sure? yes | no