When every product manufactured is unique, clients often accept quality risks in order to deliver the project on time. Testing time is limited by the project nature of a manufacturing process and the metrics of quality change when compared to repetitive manufacturing. “Fixed delivery times, prototype manufacturing, and small enterprises lack the staff depth to monitor quality identically,” says Dennis Parass of Burlington, Ontario-based Questica, an engineer-to-order (ETO) technology firm.

Quality, often defined as the absence of any defect, must have the characteristics of a system that conforms to an original design. ETO products are unique and there’s often no original design. There are data from previous projects that possess similarities and help to guide quality and accuracy, but the notion of simply rerunning a job doesn’t exist in the ETO world of manufacturing.

Defining quality and the ETO challenges
A system of quality would have the following characteristics:
1. Maintainability (easy to add new functions)
2. Conformance to specifications (fulfilling end-user requirements)
3. Long mean time to failure (few bugs and abnormal terminations)
4. Performance that is adequate or as expected
5. Well tested for functionality, user interface, and performance
6. Well documented
7. Easy to use
8. Uses standard interfaces
 “Assuming that quality is so defined, the challenges of ETO businesses to meet these criteria are significant, yet possible,” Parass says.

ETO: The challenges of quality

• Character of business—Typically, ETO firms are small businesses; the vast majority of them with less than 100 employees. They generally don’t have the support staff to implement and support a formal quality assurance system such as ISO 9001. Documenting a quality plan for manufacturing and monitoring actual performance is frequently dealt with on an ad hoc basis.
• Character of management—Typically, top management is comprised of the founders and owners of the firm. “They either have a technical background or a business background,” asserts Parass. “They are used to getting things done and finding creative ways around problems. They generally have little regard for or interest in the regimentation of process required to ensure quality.”
• Character of clients—The clients are generally larger firms than the ETO manufacturer, who are more focused on finding a manufacturer that can offer a custom solution to meet a need and don’t focus on making the ETO manufacturer meet a quality standard as a prerequisite to getting an order. That is to say that the customer contributes to the challenge by treating quality as a “given,” which it’s not.
• Character of the product—Because the product isn’t a standard, rather, at best, a custom version of something that has been made before and more likely is a unique solution (something that hasn’t been made before), several challenges to producing quality exist:
  • The product doesn’t exist as a design and must be created. This increases the risk that the fact a design doesn't meet client specifications isn't discovered until it’s built.
  • Performance testing is usually limited by the time available in the build schedule (and usually is compromised when timelines are compressed due to delays caused in the design process).
  • The pressure to delivery dates can easily cause manufacturing to meet minimum specifications and test requirements. Unlike research and development work done for serial production products, ETO products tend to be proven on the client’s work floor.

 “The historical information found through effective templates and search wizards allows ETO users to identify prior designs and locate estimates and actual costs… where replicable quality control is axiomatically included,” Parass notes.

Custom Design is Unique
Because of constant changes:
Clients make changes after the order Design releases the BOM in stages Production requires BOM changes
...All causing a stream of releases from engineering

ETO firms can benefit from a quality nonconformance tracking system, because it permits users to raise network connections from several different areas, tracking the causes of problems and actions (as well as tracking costs to the project and jobs.) Because ETO is a style of manufacturing rather than any specific industry, following are some industries that are frequently challenged by quality that depends on the variable processes confronted in one-of-a-kind manufacturing.