Skokie, IL- InterTech Development Co’s testing applications laboratory is making free engineering and cost-projection reports available to quality assurance engineers.

These are application-specific reports intended to help engineers gage the costs of integrating multiple facilities worldwide while still maintaining ISO 9001, ISO 12485:2003 and other quality standards.

InterTech President Jacques Hoffmann says InterTech seeks to assist manufacturers who have expanded globally and to correct the assumption that lower labor costs promise higher profit margins.

“In recent years, InterTech has been called in to re-engineer test-intensive assembly lines throughout the world because of the high failure rates in functional performance of reject products from assembly lines,” Hoffmann says. “Quite often, plants had been built in areas where lower labor costs were assumed to translate into significantly higher profit margins, but the real costs of designing systems that can safeguard product quality in regions with varying infrastructures, workforce skill levels, and ability to design test methods that deliver consistent gage R&R, despite these variations, are underestimated.”