Authored By:
Alejandro Rodríguez, Eng., Enrique Lozano, Eng., Manuel Velazquez, Eng.
Plexus Manufacturing Solutions
Guadalajara Jalisco, México
Summary
Growing demand for electronic products in highly regulated markets increase quality requirements in manufacturing. This translates into increased demands on manufacturing execution systems (MES) to support fast and reliable tracking processes. The traceability of product and process records are a fundamental part of a final assembly of the product and must be reliable to eliminate reprocessing, downtime or incorrect records during complex integration or assembly processes.
The acquisition of the data and supporting manufacturing systems must also be aligned with the high demands of the products. It is critical that these needs are evaluated as part of the standard work within the value stream map (VSM) to insure the installed capacity of a production line aligns with the takt time. Factors like the number of stations, data acquisition rates, communication standards, and operator motion, need to be evaluated against the components that must be integrated or installed on the final device. Additionally, just as product yield, error rates for wrong scans, or missing scans need to be included in the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) calculation.
Automation in capture of traceability data represents a good option to eliminate human intervention in those operations. This can increase the line throughput by reducing the low skill scanning activities and take 100% advantage of these highly skilled team members to transform the product. Automating does not always require expensive equipment that completely replaces human activity, but focuses on simple operations that will bring benefits of savings in labor, floor utilization, and elimination of errors.
Conclusions
Today’s manufacturing companies employ many advanced technologies through highly automated processes, however it is also important to detect those particular processes that represent high variability even though sometimes, they can seem “hidden” because they are surrounded by some other “more important processes”. Automation does not always have to represent an expensive investment, simple elegant solutions often provide the greatest value.
In this study it was demonstrated how process traceability records need to deal with complex and variable inputs as well as challenges among our machine processes. Creating a custom data collection solution that manages these sources of variance while improving the accuracy, and productivity with data collection was achieved.
Initially Published in the SMTA Proceedings
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