Hi Folks,
I am Tarun, cofounder and CEO @Ather. It’s a huge bummer for us and your frustration is mirrored within our teams also. First my apologies for the delay - and a little bit more explanation:
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Electronics delay: We knew about the general electronics industry squeeze for the last several months however we did underestimate it’s impact at small volumes. We aggressively assumed that getting a few hundred components (specially by paying 10-20X extra) should be very easy because that is literally prototyping scale. However, we were caught in the middle of a really bad cycle and getting the entire component list of more than 400 line items proved too hard.
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Quality rejects: We estimated a quality challenge on our end while assembling and ordered 10% extra components to account for it. Most of our partner-vendors are fairly large companies with decades of experience so we estimated very few problems there. Unfortunately once regular production started we had a handful of components where our rejection rates were as high as 90%+ at the partner-vendor end itself. To be honest this did break our supply chain completely. It is very hard to recover from such a massive rejection rate in less than 2 months. And even if 400 components make on time, it literally takes just 1 partner to fail their commitment for the entire production to come to a halt.
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People: We under-estimated the # of people we will need to deploy in quality and supply-chain. We had a team of about 15 to work and coordinate 70 suppliers. This put enormous pressure when multiple failures happened in quality and electronics sourcing. We needed about 40 folks in these teams.
What are we doing now to fix this:
- We are working far far tighter with our electronics partners now. For the last 2 months we have had a team of 10 engineers + supply chain folks deployed there perennially to ensure that nothing fails quality and we are not surprised about delivery. Results have started to show and we are seeing decent output there now.
- We have dialed up our follow-ups here like crazy. Have been sending our engineers to every single partner-vendor to ensure that quality is ensured during their production runs itself and we are not surprised when the material reaches our plant. We have also started deploying our own quality engineers at their locations now.
- We have already doubled up the supply chain and quality teams and are adding about 15 more poeple in the next two months. This is the biggest lesson for us. As an org our focus has been on engineering and design for the longest time. It’s time we developed these muscles.
We feel super bad about this delay and our working on ways to catch-up on this in the next 3 months. Larger teams, better processes, more inventory - whatever it takes. We are hopeful that the delay will be contained largely to the next few months only.
This time, we are also going a little conservative in our projections to ensure that we have a shot at surprising you positively on the delivery date. That is why some of you are seeing a sudden push in the delivery date.
And many of you pointed this out - we were slow in our communication this time. Yes. We were slow because this delay was a completely new one to us and we were trying to fight it without completely understanding it. We have a better handle on it now and you will see us more active on this community and elsewhere now.
Once again, many many thanks for supporting us and being active here. That more than anything else is what really matters to us.
Tarun