Background

An electrical sensor manufacturer, owned by a group of investors, has one primary customer. The president is a minority shareholder.

Situation

The company is scrapping 90% of sensors it produces, a very low yield making for extremely high production costs. The president wants to reduce prices for customers and expand customer base while maintaining satisfactory margins. Marketability is determined by the quality of "resistor reading."

Project

There is a crucial need to identify improvements for a highly complex system requiring over 10 processes and 100 steps to create a new product, an emitter. But to produce the new product profitably, they must reduce the scrap rate, increase quality, increase margins, and increase customer satisfaction for market expansion.

Challenges

Quickly educate self for unfamiliar industry and complex manufacturing processes.
Existing flow diagram documentation extremely complicated.
Only one month and 12 hours of consulting time to complete the project.

Approach

Review and update entire system flow diagram, identify critical processes.
Have team focus on key characteristics with greatest potential for overall product improvement.
Lead team in performing process analysis to identify root cause of high variability in quality.
Ask team to narrow options by conducting "design of experiments."
Revise measurement and reporting methods for data collection.

Results

Critical processes are under control, procedures are changed for properly describing desired location, temperature, airflow, and cycle time. The 90% scrap rate is reduced to 35%. Employees are trained on constant improvement methods. The company is so successful in expanding market appeal, with the highest yield of quality emitters in the industry, that it is acquired by its largest customer.

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