Quality control at heart of zippy success

By Selwyn Parker

Auckland electronics manufacturer Compuspec belongs to what might be called the "just-say-yes" school of exporting.

When British telecommunications giant Cable & Wireless wanted the Mt Wellington firm to knock out 125,000 units - actually complex circuit boards - in six weeks, the partners swallowed hard and said yes.

Never mind that this was a feat the company had never attempted before nor, for that matter, had any other technology company in New Zealand, nor that the technology was new, and that even Cable & Wireless wasn't at all sure it could be done.

Yes, Compuspec would do it, agreed Mark Eaton and Brett Caulton, the founding partners who have known each other since their schooldays at St Kentigern and who both turn 40 this year. And yes, they would be delivered to Britain on time and to spec.

And yes, they did it, just. No less than 62,000 units - half the total order - left the factory in the sixth and final week, greatly impressing the customer.

"The order gave us a huge amount of credibility with Cable & Wireless," recalls Garry Reynolds, Compuspec's chief executive.

The achievement also impressed a few other telecommunications companies around the world to whom Compuspec now sells its world-beating technology.

It's a very clever piece of home-grown technology known as a "dialler" or "zippy", more technically a network access device, that lets subscribers dial into a competing phone network like Clear without the chore of punching in a special preliminary code, like 050.

And a lot of upstart phone companies around the world want zippies. Production is booming to keep pace with demand. Every month around 25,000 units are shipped abroad - to Europe, Britain and China among other countries and, probably soon, to America after Compuspec's boffins developed a more sophisticated Mark 6 version of the dialler that met tough US regulations.

Compuspec's just-say-yes philosophy has borne some impressive fruit. For example, in employment. In 18 months Compuspec's staff was just 17; last week it was 52.

"And we're hiring another eight on Monday," adds Reynolds. Compuspec will move soon to double shifts.

And in turnover, which will jump from last year's $2 million a year to $15 million-$20 million this year.

The diverse nationalities of Compuspec's highly technologically literate staff provide a glimpse into the future of New Zealand's exporting technology companies. It's like a mini-United Nations, with South Africans, Samoans, Niueans, Malaysians, mainland and Hong Kong Chinese, Sri Lankans, Indians, Canadians and British among the New Zealanders. Reynolds, 43, is an Australian who arrived here when he was 19.

The engine room at Compuspec is a glass-enclosed floor where the devices, starting as a clay-coated length of green board, work their way around a U-shaped production line of people interspersed with Japanese-made equipment - tireless metal hands that grab the electronics and place them on the boards with stunning speed and precision.

For the humans on this production line, however, it's hard, painstaking yakka where every single item has to be double-checked and triple-tested.

"We can't afford any failures of quality control," explains Reynolds. That's partly because, being a long way from their markets, Compuspec cannot afford shortcomings in quality. But just in case, the company usually produces more units than the order requires.

Reynolds, who has worked at Motorola among other technology companies, firmly believes that the secret of quality control lies not in lots of eagle-eyed inspectors at the end of the line, but in the appreciation by each person that the onus lies with them. Hardly a word is spoken as the units pass down the line to be assembled, fired up, checked and re-checked.

Compuspec will do anything legitimate to stay ahead of the zippy game. At the corner of the U-shaped production line, one man is busy grinding off the names of the manufacturers from some of the components so that competitors won't be able to trace their source.

Upstairs, software and hardware engineers are designing new generations of the equipment that they hope will keep competing manufacturers at least a step or two behind. They add extra features at no extra cost, for example, the capability to measure the effectiveness of marketing programs by logging customer reaction.

But, above all, they set out to be different in a market where there's only the quick and the dead. "We add functionality all the time," explains Reynolds. "We want to continue to destroy the competition.

If we do the same technology as everybody else, we will become like everybody else." Despite the success of its zippies, Compuspec is a lot more than a zippy company. It's a technology company that the partners established in 1982 out of the wreckage of the collapsed Zylab. Highly versatile, the company made systems to manage car engines and braking systems, and produced a modem for IBM.

Compuspec only got into the telecommunications industry when Eaton and Caulton swooped on a tender by Clear for just such a device and cancelled their Christmas holidays to produce a successful prototype.

Since then, the exports have come in stepping stones. "At first we made one product for one market," explains Reynolds, who has just finished a business diploma specialising in new ventures.

"Then we added more markets for the same product. Next we aim to create more products for more markets." Right now, Compuspec is somewhere between stages two and three.

Its exports are based on one outstanding product that sells all over.

With the firm's record so far, you have to say that the chances of reaching stage three look good.

You do, however, wonder where Compuspec would be now if the partners had said "no, can't be done".

* Contributing writer Selwyn Parker is available at wordz@xtra.co.nz.