Cost-driven material changes in the production department
To relieve the pressure of rising silver raw material prices and internal profit targets, the production department directly reduced the silver content in the raw materials from 0.3% to 0.1% without conducting performance verification. The logic behind this adjustment is straightforward: silver is the cost item with the highest proportion in the raw materials (for example, for every 0.1% reduction in silver content, the cost of raw materials per ton can be reduced by about 8% - 10%). However, the production department completely ignored the decisive role of silver in the core performance of the product. Originally, the 0.3% silver content was a critical value designed for the "conductive stability of electronic components". After reducing it to 0.1%, the volume resistivity of the material will soar from 1.7×10⁻⁸ Ω·m to 5×10⁻⁸ Ω·m, directly exceeding the basic requirements of "low resistance and high reliability" for electronic devices. More crucially, the production department neither conducted small - batch trial production tests nor informed the R & D or quality departments simultaneously, completely prioritizing "cost reduction" over "performance guarantee".
The essence of customer complaints: A serious mismatch between performance and demand
Customers' complaints are not "unreasonable vexations" but rather because the product performance fails to meet their actual usage scenarios. When customers apply the adjusted materials to industrial-grade relays, problems first emerge in the "high-temperature accelerated aging test": after the material with a silver content of 0.1% is placed in an environment of 120°C for 72 hours, a visible oxidation layer appears on the surface, causing the contact resistance to soar from the initial 8 mΩ to 120 mΩ, far exceeding the customer's requirement of "≤20 mΩ". Subsequently, during actual use at the customer's end, there is even a fault where "the equipment stops operating due to poor contact after 3 months of operation" - these problems directly hit the customers' core demand for "product reliability" and ultimately trigger complaints.
Responsibilities of the client: Short-sighted decision-making prioritizing price
The customer's "constant price - squeezing" is an important driving force behind this problem. In the early business communication, the customer's core demand has always been "to reduce procurement costs": they requested price cuts for the products twice in a row (with a 6% reduction each time), and even threatened to "switch to competitors", completely refusing to discuss "the balance between price and performance". The customer believes that "the silver content in the material does not affect its use", or mistakenly assumes that "the performance of all similar materials is the same". For example, the customer once presented a competitor's quotation and emphasized that "the competitor's price is 12% lower than yours", while ignoring that the silver content of the competitor's product is only 0.08% (moreover, the competitor's customer scenario is "short - term use in consumer electronics", rather than the customer's "long - term use in industrial equipment"); or the customer's cost budget has been compressed to the point where it "can only cover the raw material cost of 0.1% silver content", directly putting the production department in a dilemma of "either reducing costs or losing the order".
The core vulnerability on our side: A blank in the understanding of customer needs
Our lack of basic research on the customer's testing standards and usage scenarios is the key factor leading to the wrong decision on changes. Before the project was launched, we failed to confirm two key issues with the customer:
1. Test conditions: Does the customer adopt the accelerated aging test of "high temperature (150°C) + high humidity (90%RH)"? Is the durability test of "1000 insertions and extractions" required?
2. Usage scenarios: Is the customer's product used for "short-term consumer electronics devices" (such as mobile phone chargers) or "long-term industrial control devices" (such as power plant monitoring systems)?
If we had known in advance that the customer's test condition was "high-temperature aging at 150°C", we would have understood that "the resistance of materials with a silver content of less than 0.2% would double within 72 hours". If we had known that the usage scenario was "long-term use in industrial equipment", we would have rejected the production department's adjustment of the silver content. However, due to the lack of this part of information, the production department mistakenly thought that "a silver content of 0.1% could meet the requirements of normal scenarios", which ultimately led to the failure of the product in the customer's special environment.
In short, this problem is the result of the combined effects of three factors: "the production department sacrifices performance to reduce costs", "the customer ignores logic to drive down the price", and "our side abandons research to save trouble". The core contradiction lies in the fact that "all parties only focus on their own demands but fail to align with the most basic principle of 'matching performance with scenarios'."