How would your car behave if the Computer in your car never got data from its Engine Sensor? Not very good things I imagine. Like a car today, which has many sensors to determine the health of a car..what most Electronics manufacturers lack is a complete suite of Test Data sensors across ALL their manufacturing stations.

Today the most dominant sensor for getting Test Data on Electronic Products in manufacturing environments is through ATEs (Automatic Test Equipment). At IntraStage though, probably 90% of our customers also have some Stations in manufacturing whether repair, manual assembly stations etc.. where an ATE is not feasible or required. What happens at these Manufacturing Stations is that some operation is performed on the product and then a small number of Test Data is recorded on Paper.

While this is good that the Test Data is actually being recorded on paper..what is difficult about this situation is not having the ability to quickly aggregate and mine the Test Data to determine true Yields, SPC, Rework etc. Having a stack of paper located in some filing cabinet always seem to de-motivate people to do that…go figure. 🙂

No longer is this a necessary situation though..web based technology can solve this problem by allowing Test Data to be directly recorded in Paperless Web based forms. While this adoption has been slow…we feel that it is inevitable that all Test Data will be digitized..and only then will the Company have a complete view of its manufacturing metrics like yield, rework, scrap etc.