As a 3rd party Supplier Management, AMREP is a company of last resort for urgent corrections of defective product quality. It is hard to solve product quality problems when the problems are created by a customer's rush into production. Experiences lead to knowledge and minimization of anticipated engineering, design, quality, production and marketing problems. We used this knowledge through skilled and think-out collaboration with the customers and its suppliers.
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The Truth about the Xbox 360 - A Hurried Launch
A desire to win the console war and design compromises lay behind the “red ring of death” debacle that cost Microsoft $1.77b, says Dean Takahashi, Livewire, The Age, Dec 4, 2008.
The infamous Xbox 360 “ring of death” (indicating a failed unit) has caused Microsoft and its customers untold pain in the last three years since the console's launch in 2005, can cost it US$1.15 billion last year. Microsoft has never said publicly why the console was plagued with faults. It seems that poor production was at the heart of the failures and all round problem with no single cause except impatience on the company's part as it tried to become the leader in the video game console. Even though early testing showed that production machine had flaws, Microsoft didn't delay the launch because it believed the quality problems would subside.
In the hurried design process, Microsoft decided later to add a hard disk drive, and then wireless controls. The hard drive blocked airflow on one side of the machine; the wireless modules had to have enough space to avoid electrical interference. The console shell was poked full of holes to ensure air flow. In the end the machine was a series of compromises.
“It turned out in the end that this was all going too far, too fast” a source says. “They were adding too many features after things were knocked down. That incremental feature adding just made it fragile.” 
Some of the defects were latent, potentially not showing up for some time after the machine was used. Up to 50 percent of all defects can be latent. And production yields, the number of machines coming of the production lines that passed the testing were low. In August 2005, the machine's aggregate defect rate from Microsoft's contract manufacturers Flextronics and Wistron, in their factories in China was allegedly just 68%. In a memo dated August 30, 2005, the team reported overheating graphics chips, cracking heat sinks, cosmetic issues with the hard disk and the front of the box, under performing graphics memory chips from Infineon (now Qimonda) and more. “There were so many problems, you didn't know what was wrong” a source says. Shutting down production to debug everything properly might have delayed the launch in Europe or Japan. Microsoft responded to this story (in full at http://www.venturebeat.com.ly/xbox360) with a statement that it has already acknowledged an “unacceptable number of repairs” to Xbox 360.
The warning signs were present even before Microsoft shipped any machines. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, the average return rate for products where the consumers get their money back is about 2 percent. Microsoft internal data assumed that in the long term about 7 percent of the consoles would be defective before shipping into the market – a yield of around 93%. The rate of return was expected to be low as well. The rate of return was expected to be low as well. But even after 2005, Microsoft struggled to ship enough units. The yield was typically only around 70% far short of the target until May 2007. By the end of March 2006, Microsoft said it had shipped more than 3.3 million consoles to retailers. But there was a growing “bone pile” of more than 500,000 defective consoles in a warehouse at Wistron and a repair centre in Texas.
In September 2006, Microsoft conceded that the quality of the consoles made during 2005 was not as high as it expected in July 2007. There was no single reason for the failures. In January 2007, Microsoft shut down manufacturing of the console and did not build any more machines until June.
