My primary responsibility is to take care of existing products that are currently being manufactured by my company. In this case a "product" is a circuit board that performs a particular function in the large corporate telephone systems that our company builds.

On any given day, a supervisor on the production line may contact me telling me that one of the circuit boards that I'm responsible for is failing a certain test at a very high rate and they are unable to meet their production quota for the board. My job is to figure out why this is happening and take the necessary corrective action to get the product to pass the test. The problem might be that the testing equipment is out of whack or there's a poor design of the circuit board, or one of several other causes.

Much of the work associated with solving problems like being a detective. There are archives of information that can be accessed to look at previous changes that have been made to the circuit board or to the test equipment or to the assembly processes, etc. and these can give clues as to what may have happened. Often, I need to use equipment like an oscilloscope or a data logic analyzer to figure out if there's a design or component problem.

Resolving a problem like this might take an hour or it might take several weeks.

Once the problem is isolated, I need to take the necessary action to correct the situation. If there's a design problem, I need to write what we call an ECO (Engineering Change Order) that documents a change in how the circuit board is to built in the future and how to fix any existing products with the problem.