How we tracked marriage in the real world and debugged the production of board games

We have debugging codes “sewn up” into different components on every physical game. I remember that I promised a topic about debag our production in the real world. Here he is. At the same time can be useful online shopping.

First about the production. An ordinary board game is made up of dozens of components, and a lot of things are done manually. The ideas of assembly automation are beginning to become realistic either with very large production volumes or with very expensive labor in the country. Both of these conditions are fulfilled for Germany - and that’s not all of them automated there. We all know how to check automated lines - hang sensors, compare readings in the accounting system and monitor each line parameter. What to do in the case of manual production is a good question. And we started to solve it with breakpoints. And brought the level of marriage to less than one hundredth percent . This is very cool, and with most of the returns and replacements - thanks to the carriers who turn in the boxes with accurate kicks.
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But I will start, again, from the very beginning.

Assembly

^{Danethok assembly line}

The first level of control is to check how adequate the components themselves are at all. Here, for example, the hourglass, which is used in many games:



Specifically, this party came from China (because no one can beautifully make such a simple thing as an hourglass for 30 seconds in Russia). In winter, the carrier may mop up, and condensation may form inside the watch due to temperature differences. From this sand will cease to crumble. There are just kotsan watches (as a rule, they can be recognized by a box with signs of falls), there are various non-standard options. All this is checked at the time when the components fall into the warehouse.

Each industrial party has an acceptable level of marriage. For example, in the case of an order of 5000 hours, the good Chinese immediately put another hundred on top just in case, so as not to make a second delivery. If the marriage accumulates more than this hundred, we will describe it, take a photo of it and demand to send another hour, or subtract the cost from the final 20-30% of the payment.

On this subject, by the way, there is a wonderful anecdote.

The next stage of production is the grouping of components . Remember the chips, which lie in ziplokah or heat shrinkable bags? So, you need to collect them for N pieces in the package. At the same time, the mistakes here are unequal: if the chips are N + 1, it is not terrible, but if N-1, you will have to recall the batch.

A special colored circle is applied to each bag, it means a batch number. By its color, you can install a specific collector responsible for this circulation.

These bags are in stock:



But similar to the game:



If suddenly there comes information that in such a game the wrong composition, we recognize the color of the label and understand the source of the marriage. But this is only a small part of the solution of the problem.

Build a deck - a non-trivial task. You need to collect, say, exactly 150 cards. According to our suppliers, we noticed many years ago that decks with pictures are easy to assemble, but everything with letters can and will be confused. Because too similar cards.



Another interesting feature is that there is almost no “not reported” marriage, because the assembly process involves stuffing a certain number of cards into the deck. We tried, by the way, to check it on strain-gauge scales, but there is no special meaning for paper (but it’s convenient for plastic). It turned out that the collector, who worked for a week, is able to take any of the hundreds of decks in his hands and say whether all the cards are there by weight and thickness of the pack. As in the joke: “I have not played for a long time. Well, let's mix ... yes, the six of them are not enough. ”

But on the other hand, there is a marriage “they put the same cards twice, and some of them did not enter.” This happens, for example, when for some reason another card suddenly starts in the middle of the box. It does not have to be this way (this is a printing condition), but rarely. We try to avoid this even in the production of cards. Therefore, in general, each card is also numbered:



These numbers are the ordinal number in the deck. For example, 98 and 16 are looking at us here.

When the layout of the card changes, we can add a hundred to the number (or a thousand, if there are more than 100 cards in the deck). Cards 159 and 59 should not appear in the same deck for 80 units - these are clearly different layouts. But we did this only a couple of times: it turned out to be much simpler, cheaper and more reliable to dispose of the remnants of the first edition and work only with the new one.

Below is a photo of how decks are marked: a card with the number of the collector is added to each. Since we do not want to spend the card just like that, there is also a bit of advertising. Here is a game with several decks, each with its own map. As you can see, the same deck assembled a large deck and one of the smaller ones.



Further, the assembled components can be stored in the warehouse for some time and only after a couple of weeks to get to the assembly assembly. The final assembly of the circulation - marking the box with a special debugging code. Also wired in color, like this (circle on the inside of the lid):

Exit control

At the exit from the assembly area from 1% to 10% of the product is selectively opened and checked from beginning to end. If everything is normal, a go-ahead is sent to the warehouse.

Transportation

When we reduced production faults, the number of returns fell, but not as much as we would like. I remind you that we reduced the number of marriages to approximately 0.01% (counting by discovered: some may not return even when in rare cases someone decides not to return the box).

In this case, most of the returns were related to transportation. Here is an example of a recent return to the store (the box is not our production):



It could be someone's gift, but did not - thanks to the loaders. Therefore, we went a little further for our production and decided that it was useless to swear with loaders (more precisely, other people are engaged in this). And for a particular warehouse, harsh Russia is just a surrounding reality that needs to be accepted with all the features.

Therefore, the next step after getting ready-made games is to assemble special transport boxes . Each game is carefully measured before printing and a box is made exactly millimeter-to-millimeter for the batch. Usually it is 8-10 games for a transport corrugated container for standard boxes, 12 for cubic ones, 24 for small ones, 5 for extra large ones. The result - there are fewer returns, but there is much to grow in this plan.

General procedure

If a person has a defective copy in his hands, he can call the color of the cup from under the lid - this is necessary not for production, but for us, retailers. We can track where this party went, and open 10 more boxes to figure out if this is a one-time marriage or serial. Not everyone is able to recognize the color exactly, so we ask you to send a photo or focus on the box brought. At the same time, similar colors lie far apart in circulation (pink and purple will go into circulation with a minimum difference of six months), so it usually turns out to solve everything by phone.

Production sends a replacement through us (Mosigra retail) or by itself. Somewhere a couple of times a month, additional sending of cards is done in registered letters, a couple of times - whole boxes are sent.

In parallel, when we have the debug box code, the number of the collector and the data about the lot from which the assembly was made, we can understand what exactly the error was. An additional advantage of the system - each collector has a bonus for the lack of marriage. If his codes are not returned to production, he earns more.

A similar system in a simplified form is used on retail materials:



The whole system was introduced and rooted for a couple of months. Tikhon, the head of Magellan (theory from him), then closely engaged in this, Seryoga, the head of the production (and assembly line), who put all this into practice, got involved in the matter.

Everything. Here there is still an old topic about the shoals of printing houses , and here - analysis of specific cases of bugs in our sales.