Production Batch
A production batch is the group of products manufactured together with the same material sources, the same board revision and the same software version. When a problem arises, the unit of traceback is the batch: the affected products are determined at batch level, not one by one.
For the batch definition to be useful, the information that defines the batch has to be recorded:
- Production date and batch number.
- Board revision and the bill of materials version belonging to that revision.
- The loaded embedded software version.
- Supplier batch information for critical components.
- The serial number range in the batch and the functional test results.
When a symptom recurs in the field, this record quickly answers two questions: is the problem a single board's own failure, or a systematic situation concerning a particular batch; and how wide is the scope of the affected boards. Being able to narrow the scope prevents both unnecessary replacements on the customer side and a broad inspection burden on the manufacturer side.
Batch logic also defines the effectivity of changes: when it is written down "from which batch onward" an engineering change is valid, why two boards in the field behave differently can be read from the documentation.
The context in which this term is used: Our Services