real-time analysis | IntraStage

Managing Supplier Quality with Remote Data Monitoring and Alerts

Summary

This IntraStage Case Study describes the benefits that were realized by Teradyne’s application and use of the real-time IntraStage Supplier Quality System. Benefits of implementation of the IntraStage solution included faster time to manufacturing, better quality, and lower costs.

Background

When producing highly complex test equipment, Teradyne is no stranger to cost, time and urgency. As a world leader in the automatic test equipment (ATE) market, Teradyne is a leader in the application of thorough, comprehensive test processes and quality control. As part of its commitment to its customers to produce an ATE tester that is free of defects, reliable, and capable, Teradyne’s focus on quality is not only dependent on quality from the manufacturing floor, but also from supplier-sourced components.

Bryan Johnson, a supplier engineering manager at Teradyne, foresaw a problem with their current supplier management: “We proactively worked with suppliers to qualify parts and establish robust control plans. But, in addition to normal process audits, we needed to assure the control plans at our suppliers were being executed based on real time data collection and analysis. We were also concerned that processes for our most challenging parts could drift over time, impacting yields and the ability of suppliers to ship the quantity of parts we needed on time. We needed Statistical Process Control (SPC) deployed for a global supply base that often-lacked knowledge and experience with SPC methodologies and needed a data archive for our most challenging and important component specifications.”

Requirements

Instead of depending on suppliers to both learn and develop skills in SPC, Bryan and his team started evaluating options for performing what he calls ‘remote data monitoring and alerts’: making sure that the suppliers are capturing critical parametric performance metrics automatically before their product ships out to Teradyne. ‘It was critical that we have a blended model of data input: both manual data entry, and to support existing file outputs by those suppliers with minimal disruption to their processes and productivity. We also wanted to make sure that suppliers could benefit from the system and gather the data that would help them to improve their processes, yield and quality.’

With multiple suppliers, including some suppliers making the same component, security and supplier access to the correct information were also critical. Data from these processes can remain in silos, which creates obstacles for Teradyne engineers to access, analyze, and use to improve testing processes and product design. Therefore, the Teradyne engineers would have to maintain a complete view of all suppliers’ data and performance. The engineers’ goals were to:

– Minimize quality-based supply chain disruptions to ensure Just In Time (JIT) manufacturing
– Ensure early visibility of supplier quality issues
– Reduce customer recalls and quality issues
– Maintain yields of our most challenging parts

Implementation

Using a blend of IntraStage’s Paperless Manufacturing product and customer adapters allowed Teradyne to incorporate data from multiple sources. The Paperless Manufacturing forms were customizable via a GUI, which allowed Teradyne engineers to self-serve and develop new forms quickly, and to edit the forms to capture richer metadata from the suppliers. The custom adapters converted source data into the IntraStage cloud-based database, allowing real-time visibility of the test data by both Teradyne and the suppliers. By receiving and being alerted on this data in near real-time, Teradyne and their suppliers could take action on potentially negative emerging trends.

Analysis

A key output of the data capture was the implementation of Western Electric Rules and Statistical Process Control analytics on the source data. Bryan Johnson’s team was not satisfied if the data were merely passing; they wanted to see if data were starting to develop negative capability indexes based on Cpk and Cp. By keeping an eye on SPC tables giving every parametric measurements’ Cp and Cpk, a quick visual check could easily identify performance. Drilldown into each parametric measurement on Xbar-R and characterization charts could quickly identify useful variables responsible for performance degradation. By identifying emerging trends, corrective actions were taken prior to potentially bad components even being shipped to Teradyne.

Lessons learned

By keeping critical supplier data in an off the shelf IntraStage database, with near real-time alerts and notifications, Teradyne has been able to better work with suppliers to maintain tight quality and time to market. Teradyne is maintaining and growing market share by maintaining brand quality and customer satisfaction with it world-class testing equipment. IntraStage’s BlackBelt manufacturing system gave Teradyne the tools it needed to not only understand where its supplier parts needed additional testing and attention, but detect emerging trends in real time to avoid issues in the first place.

For more information, contact sales@intrastage.com

Learn How You Can Achieve Similar Benefits Using WECO and SPC

Sample Fictitious Data in an IntraStage WECO report

Paperless Forms 2.0 – Digitizing your Test Data

Paperless Forms

Real-Time SPC on Test Data
Web Based Forms for Test Data Collection
Advance Reporting Capabilities
Dashboard views of SPC Trends from anywhere in the World

Recall and Return events on Medical Device and Aerospace products can have serious outcomes where the FDA, your customers or other authorities quickly want to understand and root cause failures. These events have caused the industry to create rules around Compliance and Traceability on the Test Data.

In many manufacturing environments today, much of the Test Data is still recorded in Paper based processes. Paper based Test Data potentially means inaccurate recording, manual processes to retrieve that data and difficulty in aggregating the data to get an overall view of Quality. IntraStage Paperless forms solution was created to solve the massive amounts of Paper based Test Data that is currently being taken in Manufacturing environments around the world and give additional advantages:

Quality engineers and inspectors are able to measure, manage, and report on quality activities as they happen, in real-time without straining resources.

Seamless communication between Design and the Manufacturing teams. This means that you can quickly investigate and resolve issues faster

Eliminate inaccurate spreadsheets, manual processes, and error-prone paper trails that come with hard-copy documentation.

Compliance & Traceability: Problems happen…be prepared for them

Your Data, Your Demo

Web Based Analytics to quickly root cause issues
Full Traceability of all Test Data on Products
FDA, Aerospace and other Test Data Compliance

Recall and Return events on Medical Device, Aerospace, and other Electronic products can have serious outcomes where the FDA, your customers, or other authorities quickly want to understand and root cause failures of those products. Whether the investigation is done via “paper” or through manual manipulation of spreadsheets with Test Data, the process can be prone to error, tedious and slow. In today’s fast pace environment and customer’s expectations of quick fixes to serious problems…this is no longer a competitive way to respond.

The IntraStage Analytics and Business Intelligence software can help:

Providing compliance through having secure and permanent storage of all the Test Data
Being able to quickly perform analytics on the Test Data through web based applications
Providing full traceability on how the product was manufactured

Managing, analyzing and reporting your test data in the cloud?

IntraStage has been providing solutions to companies who require real time analysis of their test data to improve product performance and reduce product failures and returns for a number of years now. Up until recently, most of these installations have required internal significant IT investment and involvement as the software application needed to be hosted on an internal server within the client’s premises.

Sometimes this was for product security reasons, other times for the uncertainty of uploading their data to a remote server outside of their control. These days, with the advent of secure cloud installations provided by companies such as Microsoft and Google, clients’ perceptions are changing. No longer is there a fear of this technology but a desire to embrace it and the cost saving benefits it provides.

Your Data, Your Demo

With the new IntraStage secure cloud version, clients can be up and running in hours rather than the days and weeks when IT departments need to be involved. There is no expensive hardware and software to maintain, enabling clients to keep the set up and running costs low. The IntraStage cloud provides users with the same high performance web based interfaces they are used to, but the test data collected is gathered and stored securely on a dedicated IntraStage server instead. For added security, each client has their own secure database space on the server. This space is allocated on system setup.

-Ian Crighton | Director & Project Manager, IntraStage Partner