Training and Education: Key to Improving Electronics Assembly

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

"When we do installs, we very often find that there's quite a bit of hand-holding required because a lot of the operators simply lack experience and training. Many don't take advantage of the industry resources that are out there and really educate themselves. Not all of them; some certainly do. Some get semi-annual training and have experts come in and conduct reviews and training classes and the whole bit, but a lot of them don’t. I think better overall education is extremely important."

MC Assembly, for their part, does a lot of internal training, according to Prina, especially when it comes to continuous improvement. "Things like the IPC's and the soldering classes; but I think to echo what we’re talking about, as far as education, we do a ton of benchmarking. I think you need to get out of your own skin and live in a little bigger world. You go see some of these other plants. I’ve been here since 1994. If this is where I lived and I never got out of our plant, I would see things that would be considered to be common place, this is the way people do things, and you don’t realize that there are better methods and better ideas out there," he explains. "It’s not about stealing, because you have to go back and you have to adapt it to what works for you. I was at Toyota recently, again, just benchmarking to see their ideas on assembly. MC Assembly is never going to be Toyota. We’re never going to buy billions of dollars’ worth of tooling; but again, there are a lot of small things that we can take away from that and learn. We belong to AME (Association of Manufacturing Excellence) and ‘share, learn, grow’ is their mantra. Just getting out and seeing how other people are doing things and then adapting them to what works best for your process is fantastic."

Prina says that in addition to benchmarking, they also send large groups of people for things like Excel training. "People knew how to load an Excel worksheet and do some basic manipulations, but they didn’t realize or even know what a macro was. We can save them hours on simple things like data entry just by doing that kind of training. We spend a lot of time and we encourage the supervisors to go out and search for things from which people would benefit and who should go."

Teaching people to think differently often results in new ideas and improved process—leading to overall improvement in processes.

The education process also can come out of getting people from different sides of the spectrum to sit down and really talk about the manufacturing challenges.

"For example, we recently had a customer that we have had for years and their designs are very, very challenging," narrates Ramirez. "One day, we took a group of our manufacturing engineers and we went and had lunch with their engineers. Slowly, the ideas started flowing engineer to engineer. It was not rocket science. It was just getting the people that are designing talking to the people that are manufacturing it, and it was fantastic. We were able to solve chronic problems by having these guys talking. From my perspective, I think that OEMs need to treat their contract manufacturers (CMs) as partners. They’re part of your organization, not just another vendor that is making you parts, but they’ve got to be a partnership, sharing ideas and having improvement activities and kaizen events together. Not just once in a quarter, let’s see what your price is and let’s see your quality, etc. The more involved the OEM is with their partner CM the better the results are going to be for both organizations."

Ramirez adds that in their results, the customers that are involved have better yields, and they have better reliability. "For the ones that are not involved, there is a little bit of struggle. We do our best but you can see a difference between the customers that are completely involved versus the ones that are not involved with the manufacturer."

"I was just going to add on to what we were saying about education. I think what Luis was just saying is really important because it’s not just about education in a single discipline like SMT technology, for example. You can't just operate in a vacuum. A manufacturer who is using an EMS should know about the day-to-day challenges that an EMS has to deal with from a practical standpoint. Beyond the technology itself. Communication, education, it all goes hand in hand," says Ellis.

When it comes to education in the assembly process, software, the continuous improvement, the level of education can be mainly comprehensive in a lot of fronts to continue to improve the process.

"I think a key thing that is very important is finding a supplier that can provide remote access and diagnostics for their equipment. Even if you only have a component with a 3% rejection rate, why is it being rejected that 3%? Sometimes it could be something as simple as your tolerances not being set exactly right on the pick and place machine. The amount that those components are supposedly out of tolerance may be totally insignificant from a process standpoint, yet it’s reducing your efficiency. These are the kind of things that our technicians can easily pinpoint and rectify through a quick diagnostic assessment of the machine’s performance. All we need is a quick phone call and an internet connection," says Ellis.

"For us, it's the same message. Reach out. Sometimes, I have to remind engineers that they’re not God and they don’t necessarily know everything. I know sometimes for the technical people, it’s a little bit harder for them to admit they don’t know everything. We try to encourage everyone to pick up the phone and call the manufacturer. I think that giving our suppliers a call and saying, 'Can you help us? I’m struggling. I don't understand.' It is very valuable," says Ramirez.

Understand Your Improvement Goals

You have to have a clear goal when you set out to improve a process. It may be a quality challenge, a cycle time challenge, or a set up challenge. It may be multiple things, according to Ramirez. "If you look at the fishbone, it could be multiple spines causing one problem. At the end of the day, what we want to do is have the product built, flow, and able to meet or exceed any quality requirements. That’s what we want to accomplish," he explains. "It’s interesting because we were talking earlier about the machine cycle times. Some of our machines run 100,000 or a gazillion components, but interestingly enough, we have found that in some instances, slowing down the equipment significantly improves the output and the flow. It is a compromise. Back to your question about the goal, it could be many different aspects. It’s just a matter of understanding what is it that you’re trying to accomplish and what could be negatively impacting the goal."

"We're rabid about reducing waste and we sit down, we value-stream map, we do some measurements, and we see where we should focus first," says Prina. "The tough part is always how you make sure that whatever you’ve done sticks. We try to use multiple events and things like that. Get people involved and then go back and just get that standard work written down and then checked daily at a supervisor or lead level, and check monthly at an executive level. Did we stink? Are we still headed in the right direction? What’s our next step? Okay, we reduced 50% of the waste, how do we get 50% out of there again?"

Page 2 of 3

• < Previous Page
• Next Page >