MSI is actually a company with prospects and potential.

Here is my experience on the sixth floor of the Taoyuan plant.

Nowadays, businesses of all sizes are trying to reduce costs and increase profits.

The manufacturing department is the biggest expense in a factory. If quality can be maintained, efficiency improved, and personnel and material resources streamlined, considerable unnecessary costs can be avoided.

MSI only established its manufacturing department in recent years. It can be said that it is unfamiliar with SMT and DIP. More directly, the two current manufacturing section managers have no experience at all! Yet they can fool their superiors completely and throw their weight around at MSI, relying on one of the so-called “Big Three.”

I will not say much more about these two people. I can only say that at other companies, they would not even have the capabilities of team leaders.

There are only two SMT lines, yet 14 operators are assigned to them, not including material preparation personnel. Even more absurdly, there are a large number of engineers—almost as many as the operators. When I first joined MSI, I spent three days observing and wondering whether the motherboards here had a different shape from those I had encountered before—perhaps they were spherical or three-dimensional triangles, which would explain why so many people were needed. But no, I was overthinking it. Anyone who has worked on an SMT line should know how many people and engineers one line actually needs!

The SMT team leader…呵呵, I do not want to say much more either. This person is extremely skilled at Tai Chi—every mistake is pushed onto the engineering department. And engineering is so saintly that it swallows every kind of problem! What leverage do you have over them that they can get away with this?

The automatic insertion machine should be used to handle difficult and time-consuming components, but that is not what happens! Simple components are handled by the machine, while difficult and time-consuming components are done manually, and then operators are required to insert them quickly without making mistakes. Machines should assist production lines and personnel, but the situation has been completely reversed.

AOI and X-ray inspection are fundamentally unnecessary before insertion and T/U. The explanation given is that “the customer wants to see it.” The data customers want comes from the testing end: they look at versions, values, and the number of failures. Would a customer randomly check whether a component was floating in the reverse direction? T/U’s job should originally be visual inspection and solder repair, but instead AOI notifies workers which positions need repair. After T/U, even more quality assurance personnel are placed on the line to inspect things, while otherwise just scrolling on their phones. From beginning to end, a line uses machines or large numbers of people for inspection. *Quality is not inspected into a product.* Other companies make this kind of demand, but not here. This kind of production-line and staffing arrangement would never appear in any contract manufacturing plant. Apart from wasting labor and resources, it cannot improve efficiency.

The soldering oven is really not something I even want to talk about. A newer machine is not necessarily a better machine. It stops from time to time, and stoppages can even be measured in hours. If a new machine cannot be controlled or mastered, its greatest use is probably just to show off when customers visit.

There are so many electronics contract manufacturers. Besides quality and capacity, cost is the key factor. With so many engineers, if any of them have worked at other contract manufacturers, I do not believe those companies would accept having three or four people do one person’s job.

Quality assurance—呵呵呵, I really do not want to say more. The devil is in the details: identify problems, prevent them, and avoid customer complaints or rework. None of that happens. Making trouble is the top priority. Someone occupies a spot on the production line to scroll on their phone, and when lunchtime approaches, they go get their lunch box. I do not want to say any more about the rest.

There are many more problems, and they do not require working there for long to see them. They are plainly visible, recurring every day, and all of them burn money and consume company resources. Whenever something happens, people say to follow the Bao’an plant’s procedures. If you are capable, why follow someone else’s methods? They cannot learn, cannot do the work, and lack the ability to make changes; all they can do is copy and paste. Being far from headquarters, the Zhonghe plant should be seeing only attractive figures without knowing the actual situation!

I stayed for only two months. The work was basically just taking care of odds and ends, and because of that I had the opportunity and time to observe, compare, and have my worldview shaken. I am not afraid of people finding out who I am, because I have always felt that MSI is truly a very unfortunate company. It has the capabilities to pursue high-value contract manufacturing, but for some reason it hires managers with no experience or ability. With labor and material costs rising year after year, how many more years can MSI hold on?

If you are thinking about working at MSI, keep your experience and methods from other plants to yourself. Otherwise, you will spend every day full of questions and wondering why. Do not worry about the most basic cost-down efforts, because, like me, you will only find them inexplicable and think that this company must have a separate business unit devoted to printing money.

In conclusion, go with the flow and do not have too many ideas. If you want to know why, you can read other people’s reviews and find out where things are stuck!