IIRC a forum member posted they use to work for Onkyo and it was the new employee's not being trained properly at the new AVR plant.
If Q.C.or poorly trained employees was not the problem then why does Onkyo have SOO many AVR failing like mine did??????
When a company opens a new mfg site, training is one of the issues they have to deal with. The company establishes processes and procedures for training. They also have processes and requirements for the actual mfg line. Each company decides how they want to position their product. Is it going to be the absolute best product with the best quality and a premium price? Maybe they want to target customers looking for the cheapest price, and only make their product as good as they can for that price. Most likely they are somewhere in the middle, but that can cover a lot of ground. (As a consumer, you must also decide where within that spectrum you want to be.)
Take a company at the high end of the quality scale. Opening a new plant somewhere like Malaysia or China is likely to save money in both logistics and personnel. Maybe the burden rate of the average employee drops from $100k/year in the US to $10k. If your factory has 1k, 5k, 10k workers, it can add up. BUT it means your employees will likely not be highly skilled, nor familiar with 6 Sigma, Lean, Statistical Process Control, or any strict mfg processes. So you have to teach them. And once again, the company must decide how much they want to spend on teaching before they begin to realize the actual savings from high volume in a low cost environment. Your company at the high end of the scale realizes it is a "pay me now, or pay me later" situation, and if they scrimp on the initial training it can damage the whole company's reputation. Another company may decide 80% on the scale is far enough, they believe they can ramp up the learning in parallel with production, and salvage unhappy customers with good service.
The best companies put incredible resources into training, AND begin their quality checks/processes at 100%. So maybe only 1 unit per day actually ships at first, but the company is confident that unit is perfect. The thing that ramps up is the volume, NOT the quality. The onerous and time consuming quality checks only ramp down AFTER the product quality is proven for a sustained time. But this costs money up front.
So I can tell you if product quality suffers from a move to a new plant, it is because tradeoffs were made to hurry the volume ramp.
