[DanBC]

As a complete guess: Much electronics manufacturing requires items to have individual (or batch) numbers for quality control.

When items fail test you can investigate the batch to find and eliminate problems of manufacture.

Sometimes this is good and effective and it works. You see that batch #3762387 failed, and that they all used a component from a delivery, so you look at the other batches using that component and they fail too.

Sometimes, however, it's just a paperwork exercise. It's frustrating for everyone trying to do the work, and the results are hopeless for anything because people are just faking the paperwork, or the paperwork is garbage. The company is only doing all of this to get a logo for their letterhead, and they must have that logo to do business with some other companies.

In the UK some of these systems (ISO900x; BS5750; etc) are sometimes seen as expensive makework nonsense.

Let me know if you ever need to find flaws in someone's paperwork because there are a few things where it's trivially easy to trip them up once you know what to look for.

[dm2]

The quality control and tracking reasons makes sense. It would allow for faster and more automated identifying of parts.

"Let me know if you ever need to find flaws in someone's paperwork because there are a few things where it's trivially easy to trip them up once you know what to look for."

I'm interested in this, can you give some more details?

[DanBC]

Electronic companies use ElectroStatic Discharge (ESD) protection. Often this is the form of a conductive wrist strap connected (via a safety resistor) to ground. Operators are usually required to check that this strap works using a test station. They then have to sign a sheet.

The real function of this: You want to know if Bob has a faulty strap, so that if a batch of product is failing, and you see that Bob is the common element, you can check Bob's paperwork. When you see that Bob had a faulty wrist strap on the 14th of June you have found the possible cause of the faults, and you have some acton you can take.

Several things actually hapen: The wrist strap tests are offered as "Pass" or "fail". No-one likes saying they have failed a test. People think the purpose is just to get a working strap, so if it fails they'll do some fiddling, wiggling the wire until it passes, or licking their wrist. These temporary measures fail when they're back at the bench, but the paperwork doesn't reflect that. And people often forget to do the test, so they'll just sign off a bunch of days when they do remember.

Thus, when you visit a factory you can gauge the understanding of QA procedures by looking at these kinds of paperwork. You'll see a sheet full of signatures. That looks great, until you realise that this factory has almost zero absenteeism, and people rarely take holidays, and sometimes people have tested their wrist-straps on public holidays when the factory was closed.

When you have a barcode printed on a device it's hard to lose track of the numbers, but sometimes route-cards are just bits of paper attached to a box. Ask people how they can be assured that the devices in that box belong to that route-card.

Paperwork is often designed poorly, and is onerous to do. It's often kludged in from above, rather than reflecting the actual job. Give people extra work, while pressuring them to get product out, and they will take shortcuts. That's often the paperwork. Often just asking people about the paperwork, in a sympathetic voice ("Oh wow, all these forms, eh? Which are the useful ones, and which ones are a bit annoying?") will get remarkable answers.

Framing language is handy. Ask people using solder paste (screen printing circuit boards with paste prior to surface mount pick and place) about "waste" - they'll say they don't waste anything. Because no-one likes to waste stuff. But actually, paste has a life, and waste is part of production. A good answer would be "We like to keep the paste clean for production, so once it gets old we move it through to jobs with less-fine pitch components, or we use it for rework, or we use it for training. I guess you could call that waste. At the end of life we carefully dispose of it to recyclers, along with our other lead dross and tin / copper snippings" but people will tend to say "we don't waste anything" and you can ask them "so, you re-use that paste? It goes back into the pot, and you use it again?" and they'll say "yep".

Some of these are trick questions and don't really tell you much about actual production. You just get to know that the QA logo is just paperwork exercise.

If it's any reassurance the QA I experienced for ground-side aviation stuff was much better - it was rigorous and detailed and investigative and we did it all properly, and the auditing was very very good.