| Copper plating of printed circuit boards (PCBs) is considered as one of the major operations of manufacturing PCBs. In a copper plating manufacturing system, there are major problems such as long setup and changeover times, low overall equipment efficiency, long process times, and low productivity of resources. This research uses modeling and simulation, lean manufacturing techniques, and design of experiments to identify waste and quantify impacts of various future states scenarios of a copper plating manufacturing system to determine the "optimal" future state before changing any properties of the actual system. A half fractional factorial design is used in conjunction with ANOVA, correlations among response variables, and meta-models to determine which factors are significant to key performance indicators (KPIs). Results show implementation of setup time reduction, total preventive maintenance, and single-minute exchange of die are the lean manufacturing practices that should be implemented for the copper plating manufacturing system. |
