| There is a practise within the industry of an Inspector inspecting a board, and that same Inspector performing touch-up. My opinion is that the Inspection and Touch-up operations should be separate functions whereby the Inspector is not performing their own touch-up. We should have a system of checks and balances and by combining the operations we have none. A Touch-up | operator who inpects their own board has the tendency to perform unnecessary rework or touch-up for fear of being written up. Can I please get some thoughts and opinions on this issue? | | Thanks, | | Mark D. Milward |
Mark,
One of the goals in the assembly process should be to eliminate any queue's. Ideally, the boards would flow right from SM to the next value add workcenter with no inspection or touch-up. This is possible with robust designs and capable processes.
Given less than optimized designs and/or less than capable processes or equipment, touchup is a reality. Given this, it makes more sense to train qualified assemblers to inspect and touchup in one operation. I am against having "inspectors" as a job description or separate work center (do the inspectors have to inspect the rework as well?). My experience is that most of what gets touched up really didn't need it whether spotted by an inspector or touchup person. Tombstones, missing parts, solder bridges are obvious and need to be reworked, but "insufficient, excess, not shiny, etc." more often than not are better joints before the rework than after. It takes a lot of training to get the inspectors and/or touchup people to understand the difference between a "process indicator" and a "rework".
As you know, the most important thing is to eliminate the causes of the touchup and move from 100% inspection/touchup to sampling to complete elimination of this function and reapply the labor to value added functions. Whatever you decide the inspection/touchup should be performed real time while the product is on the machines so the root causes can be identified and eliminated.
Steve
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