Global Automotive Component Manufacturer Uses PMA to Speed Up Root Cause Analysis

Introduction

With the concurrent outbreak of the pandemic and chip shortage, time to market is extremely crucial in fulfilling the market demand. This accelerates the demand and adoption for all kinds of IOT devices and analytical tools that can help with manufacturing health monitoring and maintaining high FPY (First Pass Yield). Nevertheless, there’s still a lot of opportunities to improve, especially in the functional test process. Root causing functional test failures can be difficult and complex. 

As a real use case, we take a high volume global automotive component manufacturer that has decades of continuous improvements experience to their manufacturing lines and continues to strive to provide the best quality for their customers. Having functional test yields less than 90% is not acceptable to them and immediate RCA is required in such cases. In this case study we will elaborate on how PMA enabled near real-time RCA of the equipment fixture issues on the production floor that caused a low yield scenario.

Organization:

•A Global Automotive Component Manufacturer

Challenges:

•Low FPY (First Pass Yield)

•Long RCA times

Solutions:

•PathWave Manufacturing Analytics (PMA)

Results:

•RCA process reduced from 6 months to 5 mins

•Improved FPY

•Daily Monitoring of fixture health

The Challenge

The global automotive component manufacturer had set up a real-time monitoring display above each tester to monitor its performance. Furthermore, they had their own in-house analytical tool to do data analytics. 

A production yield of <90% FPY brought to their immediate attention that there is an equipment issue somewhere within the production line. They busied themselves with aggregating all the data sets from each of the functional tester systems to try to figure out what was causing the low production yield. In total they spent approximately 6 months trying to root cause the issue, which turned out to be one of the fixture for the product used by the functional test systems. Much of their time went into manual data aggregation and transformation. In the process of troubleshooting the issue, the production managers needed to shut down the production line to work on the problem. After much work, monitoring, and what seemed like a reasonable corrective action, they decided to perform monthly maintenance to all the fixtures on the Functional Tester lines to rectify the FPY loss.

The Solutions

After the initial introduction to PMA’s features the company was very interested in the capabilities related to fixture comparisons, ranking of top failing tests, and top alert statistics. To prove out the benefits of using PMA it was decided to perform the demo using offline analytics. This is where the data from a possible problematic period is loaded into PMA for analysis, in this case the dataset that caused 6 months of effort to narrow down the root cause was used.

After the automated analysis of the historical data was completed by the PMA platform, it took a Keysight Field Engineer approximately 5 minutes to find the problematic fixture and the reason behind its issues. This process proved that PMA is able to save time by reducing this investigation from 6 months to just 5 mins.