I manage purchasing for a 200-person engineering firm. Every few weeks I get a request that sounds simple: “We need an RFS part for the Cypress site.” Usually it is simple. But in March 2024, a single mix-up turned a 30-minute order into a two-day scramble.
The Surface Problem: A Part Number That Should Have Been Easy
It started with a part number. Todd Pepsi, our senior RF engineer, asked me to order “an ICA12-50JPL.” I’d bought that part before—I was pretty sure. So I submitted the PO for one ICA12-50JPL from RFS Technologies, Inc. Two days later, the wrong thing arrived.
My first thought: “How did I order the wrong part? The number is right there.”
But the deeper problem wasn’t my typing. It was that we had no standard way of verifying what the number actually meant.
The Deeper Cause: It’s Not About Memory, It’s About Process
There were actually three things going on. First, internal language. Todd calls it “the JPL” and assumes I know he means the 50-ohm jumper, not the connector variant. I call it “the RFS thing with the blue label.” We were using different names for the same item—we just thought we were using the same one.
Second, the product family is huge. RFS Technologies makes dozens of cable assemblies, connectors, and antennas. The difference between ICA12-50JPL and ICA12-50JPR might be a left-hand vs. right-hand connector. One letter changes the whole thing. If you’re not working with these parts every day, it’s easy to gloss over that final character.
Third—and this is the one that took me years to see—there was no verification step in our process. It was simply: request, PO, receive. Nobody checked the specs against the actual use case. If Todd gave me a wrong number (which he did once), we lost days. If I typed it in wrong, we lost days. Either way, the process relied on one person’s memory and typing.
I’m not 100% sure why I didn’t notice this sooner. Maybe because most orders went fine. But with 60-80 orders a year, a mistake is just a matter of time. The problem isn’t carelessness—it’s that the system has no safety net.
The Real Cost: Much More Than a $180 Part
The wrong item was an RF jumper, probably around $180. But the total cost of that mistake was way higher than the price tag.
- Expedited shipping: $450 to get the correct part overnight.
- Engineer time: Todd spent half a day re-crimping and testing.
- Lost field work: Two engineers in Cypress couldn’t do their install. That probably cost $1,200 in labor.
- Reputation hit: Todd’s team started to think purchasing couldn’t handle technical parts. That hurts the next time they need something quickly.
A similar incident happened the year before. We ordered what we thought were standard 50-ohm cables. They turned out to be 75-ohm. The install crew only noticed after pulling them through the conduit. The rework cost about $2,400 in materials and hours. That one really stung.
What’s interesting is that both mistakes could have been caught with a five-minute check. But we didn’t have that check because we never thought we needed it. We were basically relying on memory and hope.
The Cheap Fix: A Three-Item Checklist
After the March 2024 fiasco, I built a simple checklist for any RF order. It’s not fancy, but it works.
- Confirm the part number directly from the RFS spec sheet—not from memory. I pull the PDF from the RFS Technologies, Inc. website and read the number back verbatim.
- Ask the engineer to say the connector type and impedance out loud. For example: “50 ohm, N-type.” If two people say the same sequence of words, it’s surprisingly reliable.
- Add a “spec verification” field to the PO. If it’s not filled out, the order gets returned.
It takes about five minutes per order. It feels silly on simple ones. But it already saved us three times. Most recently, for an order to the Cypress site, the engineer gave me the right base part number—but the spec check caught that he’d marked the wrong connector. Five extra minutes avoided another two-day scramble.
If you ask me, the answer to “how do you avoid RFS part-number mistakes?” isn’t to memorize more numbers. It’s to build a tiny bit of friction into the process. A checklist is the cheapest insurance you can buy—it’s basically free. And that’s way cheaper than a $450 overnight shipment plus the look on an engineer’s face when you hand him the wrong part.
