Training and Education: Key to Improving Electronics Assembly

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

So, what are the best practices to consider when improving the electronic assembly process? Prina says its "measure what matters."

"For years, we’ve picked out a number of KPIs and we just took some numbers here, took some numbers there, and didn’t really do much with them," he says. "We didn’t get much effect for it. We built some KPI trees, decided what key processes we really want to monitor and what we’re going to do with that information once we have it."

"Back to fundamentals," notes Ramirez. "The theory of constraints. There is one thing that is making your whole process slow. If you focus on that area, then you measure that area, you know that everything else flows. Listen to your employees. That guy or gal that is spending eight hours in front of that machine can probably tell you more about what is causing the problem. Maybe he or she doesn’t know what exactly the problem is, but by getting their inputs, understanding under what circumstances these problems happened, they typically can tell you a lot of information and help you actually fix the problem. That is something that we have to keep repeating all the time to our management team. The more your people know, the more you involve them, the better your results are going to be."

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of SMT Magazine.

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