Feature Article - Does FA Change in a Recession? - By Christopher Henderson

As any news channel will remind you, the world economy has been sliding deeper into recession as a result of easy credit conditions for the past 10 years. The economic downturn is likely to last for quite some time, with any recovery being modest at best. Since semiconductor content pervades nearly all aspects of the economy, the industry rises and falls in much the same way the world economy rises and falls. industry is currently laying off many thousands of people. Some of these people may be your friends; you may even be one of these people. Most of the economic forces are beyond our control. They are beyond the control of your management, and may even be beyond the control of your company’s executive management. What’s an analyst to do?

We can only control our own behavior and actions. Given that we might need to locate a new job at any time, we need to keep our education up to date and prepare ourselves to do failure analysis of any type. In this article, however, I would like to shift the focus on the recession’s impacts on the FA process.

Although many companies tend to scrimp on FA during economic hardship, the reality is that failures still occur and need to be addressed. The FA operation still needs to provide a reasoned, scientific approach to solving problems. Analysts need to resist the urge to “solve problems on the cheap” by skipping steps and reducing data-gathering. Management is likely to put pressure on the FA lab to reduce costs by pumping out more analyses using fewer employees and fewer dollars. It is the job of the lab manager to press back and educate management in the problems associated with doing this. A rushed analysis is more prone to errors. Overworked, tired analysts also generate more errors. When I worked at Honeywell in the 1980s, we did a study to determine if overtime increased the output of the FA lab. The findings were interesting. Overtime increased the output for about two weeks, but after the initial two weeks, the output fell back to the original level. More interestingly, the number of undiscovered and misidentified failures increased substantially. The analysts became tired and irritable, and their work quality suffered as a result. The cost of misidentification or no identification of a failure mechanism greatly exceeds the savings that result from cutting back in the FA lab.

With that said, we need to do our part to cut costs to help our companies survive. In many instances, we can manage by using less expensive tools, researching alternate techniques, taking advantage of commercial labs, and discussing the necessity of an analysis with the customer before starting it. The equipment, techniques, and people may change, but the philosophy and the process should not change. Does FA change in a recession? The answer is emphatically "No and Yes."