Research On The Management And Control Of Temporary Alternative Parts During The Electronics Assembly Production

For electronics manufacturing companies, especially the contract manufacturing ones, the main difficulties they are facing in management can be categorized into the following four aspects: serviceability, production, quality and cost. In terms of cost, companies normally attempt to improve the productivity by further increasing the capacity and minimize the non-value added work by reducing the rework and repair possibilities so as to lower the working time cost; Regarding serviceability, the operations managers are mainly focused on how to improve the customers' satisfaction so as to ensure that the company can get profitable orders. However, facing the strict auditing requirement of the customers, several questions have been haunting the management team every day such as how to ensure the traceability of products during production and rework, how to guarantee the timeliness and accuracy in response to the customers and how to be equipped with the capability of evaluating and solving any manufacturing issues which might have impact on customers. Lastly the continuous improvement of the production process management and the quality control capability has been the essential competency of the outstanding manufacturing companies. Besides, how to manage the production plan change, conduct the online monitoring, adapt to the engineering change of new products and achieve the close tracking and improvement of products' quality are all the aspects the Electronics manufacturing companies should attach importance to. In view of the requirement above, the application of Shop Floor Control (SFC) or Manufacturing Execution System (MES) might be the preferred solution.The company I'm working with is the contract manufacturer of a world class network company, mainly adopting the production mode of Make to Order (MTO) and Assembly to Order (ATO). The company is applying the Agile system to manage product information, using the famous ERP software, SAP to plan the enterprise resources and employing the self-developed SFC system to control the production line and track the products' quality. This dissertation is compiled based on the design, development and implementation of the SFC system project. By analyzing the existing production control system, the design and development of the new system are conducted accordingly aiming to make improvement on the fields with defects under the current system. The original simple serial number tracking function has been developed into several more advanced control functions such as multiple functions of production data collecting, production process control, E-management of SMT process, management report system establishing, production pre-alarm monitoring and the production statistics management. To be more specific, in terms of the online data collecting, the collection of the key parts information, testing statistics, repair and rework record can be of great help to the end-to-end tracking of products. The new system can also efficiently help control the abnormalities during the production process like unauthorized operation, wrong component loading, mistaken production station input etc. As for the main production procedure SMT, SFC is mainly focused on providing the function of the wrong material upload prevention, part shortage pre-alarm, component tracking, steel net and stannum feeder control. The successful implementation of the new system in N company has enabled the informationization of the production management, solved the problems of product traceability, production control and corporate level system integration. As a result, it has considerably improved the management capability and work efficiency and enhanced the core competence of the company. Besides, the design and development of SFC system can also be of reference value to other research in the same field.