I am being asked by management to setup one piece flow through every operation. We have SMT,DIP,RAD,AX,MANU,WAVE, Quite a bit of hand soldering, Post Inspection, AOI,CLEANING,BARCODING then out the door. We have rougly 60 different products with most having 50 to 100 piece workorders. I struggle with this idea due to the amount of changeover and idle time for mixes of components per board. I see alot less utilization of the equipment in the regard.
I presently run through TH, then cue for manual (wip) then its first in first out through the other processes. For SMT, all of our boards are DSR and then hand soldering connectors since we do not have glue capability for running a bottomside glue process.
All of these products meet in the middle at AOI.
I can give more details if someone would give me feedback if they are currently running One piece flow given these amounts of changeovers. I know we could increase WO qty' but I want to throw that out for now.
I came from a facility with High Volume/Med Mix and we converted our plant to FMS where we had 5 redundant lines SMT, TH , MAN ,etc but we always had a relative amount of wip cued between these processes SMT/TH/MAN.
reply »