FORTASA BLOG

Our local manufacturers’ representative found an excellent opportunity for our products, and took me into a sales call. The customer profile was perfect; this was a manufacturer of Utility Meters. Business volume was medium size. SSD requirements were quite common, low capacity, high reliability, longest life expectancy, industrial temperature support.

Bill of Material Lock for all Fortasa SSDs

I was ready to was ready to do another run of my corporate and product presentation, talk about our unique technology, life expectancy verification, product qualification process and our production capability, something I perform on practically every sales call.

But this customer was quite different. Rather than focus on our technology and quality, the questions posed to me dealt with product changes, firmware revisions and customer acknowledgements.

After I had answered the most critical questions that were posed to me, I dug a bit deeper to understand customer's concerns. Turns out that they early on this customer had designed-in an SSD from supplier S******K, one of the largest manufacturers and sellers of consumer retain Flash cards. The corporate representatives assured the listeners about their product quality, technical capability and gave the most aggressive price that was most attractive to the customer.

After a two months long qualification effort, customer had approved the SSD and added the component tot he Approved Vendor List (AVL) and transitioned the platform into production. As the sales started to materialize and production volume started to increase the customer was getting intermittent field failures. The source of the problem took a while and quite an effort to identify.

Turned out that the incumbent supplier shipped the qualified drive under the approved part number, but the contents were changed. In an effort to reduce product cost, the supplier replaced the Flash memory components of the original SSD with different, lower cost, devices. Since the same devices were targeting the Industrial and the less demanding retail customers, the supplier did not consider the effects of replacement of the materials to the Industrial customers. Nor did he provide any acknowledgement of the changes to the end product to the end customer ahead of the switch.

So the point of pain for the customer was not only that the selected device needed to operate reliably in the targeted platform, but the supplier needed to guarantee that identical device would be shipped under the same part number for the full duration of production.

All of Fortasa products are properly identified by the specific Marketing Part Number. This number is uniquely translated into specific critical components - Connector, PCB, Flash Controller, Flash Controller Firmware and Flash memory component. Every order against this specific part number guarantees that the critical components are exactly the same as those of the qualified product. In addition whenever any changes occur to these components, Fortasa issues a Process Change Notice (PCN) identifying the expected changes and respective new part numbers. The same PCN offers a six months last time buy and additional six months of last time ship of the discontinued product. This provided sufficient amount of time for the end customer to qualify the replacement product and continue production uninterrupted.

Please contact Fortasa to discuss your solid state product requirements or your production needs.