Ten steps for achieving good design for excellence.

Eliminate variation that causes inefficiency or defects, while maintaining flexibility to scale.

A configure-to-order assembly process helps reduce finished goods inventory and enhance scheduling flexibility. However, it also introduces variation in the production process. Use of Lean manufacturing principles in designing production flow can ensure efficiency and minimize the defect opportunities this level of variation could otherwise create.

SigmaTron International’s facility in Acuna, Mexico, has a dedicated assembly and test “focused factory” area to provide configure-to-order (CTO) services for a manufacturer of industrial products. The customer has outsourced over 50 different product types that are a mix of legacy and current product.

Design for manufacturability (DfM) analysis is performed during the new product introduction (NPI) phase to identify potential issues prior to the product entering production. Test strategy and programming development is conducted for new products, and test programming is optimized for legacy products, where needed.

But don’t obsess over the distribution.

Yes, I said it. Normal data are nearly never normal.

In Six Sigma classes we study outliers, shift, drift and special cause events. But what we don’t always consider is that these “unexpected” data points may be part of the process and not as rare as we think.

First, let’s look at a set of screw torque data. The chart in FIGURE 1 is for a set of screw torques taken sequentially from a “smart” driver. We can see the data are normal (p=0.895), and the histogram and time series plot back that up.

There are times increasing inventories and AVLs makes sense.

A constrained supply chain represents a challenge to Lean manufacturing processes, but in the electronics manufacturing services (EMS) market, the bigger challenge is often OEM misperceptions about strategies to address this. From a Lean perspective, navigating a constrained supply chain often requires taking one step back to move two steps forward.

Our November 2017 column discussed several areas where the best strategy was “at odds” with Lean manufacturing principles, including:

• Plan further out;
• Hard orders beat forecasts;
• Increase the number of suppliers; and
• The marketplace dictates it is smarter to carry more inventory.