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Jeff Hotchkiss, President of the Assembly Test Division of Teradyne, Inc., the largest electronics testing company in the world, returned to the corporation where he had built his career after a three-year hiatus as CEO of a VOIP start-up. Teradyne's operation was struggling through the effects of a bad economy coupled with significant downturns in the electronics industry, and Hotchkiss encountered numerous problems specifically in the China operation, including customer dissatisfaction with service, price, and time required to implement changes. He assembled a strategic team to address these issues and to recommend and implement an accelerated turnaround in China. Students are challenged to design the turnaround plan.

This case presents a problem with competing in the Chinese market faced by Jeff Hotchkiss in early 2000s, then President of the Assembly Test Division (ATD) at Teradyne. Teradyne is the world’s largest producer of automatic test equipment for electronic assembly on production lines. Hotchkiss needed to find a solution to prevent ATD from continued loss of market share in equipment sales and loss of service revenue in China. Various factors to be considered include customer differentiation and service supply chain configuration.

This case is a field researched case. The research team met with Teradyne’s division president and top management team, and was given access to the documents including customer feedback.

Graduate or undergraduate: operations management, supply chain management.

Large ohm film resistors that guard sensitive telecommunication devices against the hazards of lightning require a set of exacting characteristics for tolerance, endurance, and productivity. These characteristics largely depend on how the resistor is trimmed. Conventional laser trimming is unable to provide all the requirements for this important resistor application. A new technique developed by Teradyne Inc. called Algorithmic Trimming employs an algorithm and data base to calculate real‐time trim vectors that are used in a trimming hardware processor to overcome the drawbacks of conventional trimming. With this new technique 50‐ohm film resistors were trimmed to specification with 0·1% tolerance while attaining high resistor stability and a trim time of 300 milliseconds.

With the emergence of surface mount technology and, more recently, advances in packaging technologies (i.e., ball grid arrays), test continues to be a complex, time‐consuming process and, in the limit, unfeasible. The adoption of IEEE 1149.1 boundary‐scan and the wide acceptance of this standard have resulted in a pragmatic test solution for densely packed SMT circuit boards. Many organisations have become extremely successful in manufacturing test through their commitment to boundary‐scan. Although boundary‐scan has alleviated many of the test engineer's problems, all but a handful of these organisations have a narrow focus of using boundary‐scan to benefit only manufacturing test. However, this same technology can be exploited in design, at the prototype debug stage, as well as at the system test level, whether it be in the factory or the field, yielding significant benefits throughout the entire product life cycle. Three case studies are reviewed to highlight the problems posed by SMT at prototype debug, manufacturing test and system level test. The impact of boundary‐scan is illustrated at each stage of a product's typical life cycle. The paper looks at some real applications and benefits of boundary‐scan at the board prototype stage, the manufacturing test stage, as well as at the system‐level stage. The data presented represent three distinct industries: computer manufacturing, telecommunications and automatic test equipment.

Janette Rowland has been appointed marketing services manager of General Hybrid. Based at their facility on Tyneside, and reporting to the general sales manager, Ms Rowland is responsible for all PR, marketing support and promotional activities for General Hybrid worldwide. She joins the company from CSM, a software house, where she held the position of marketing executive.