Engineering - Introducing Automated First Article Inspection Series

 Engineering is the first area affected by the New Product Introduction of customers PCB's. The customer hands over to them the Bill of Material and PCB CAD files for the product being introduced. The Engineering department must perform a few tasks being entering the customers BOM into the CEM's ERP/MRP system. They then must create a Pick and Place(P&P) file used to populate the PCB in the SMT Area. They also may have to create a AOI Inspection file used by the AOI Equipment. The P&P file and AOI file is created essentially by either manually of semi-automatically combining the customers BOM which tells us what the parts are and the PCB CAD file which tells us where the parts go on the PCB. This process is at best semi-manual and at worst a completely manual process.

This manual process has no way except manually to double check whether or not a mistake has been made. If a mistake is made here then the FAI check against the P&P file will only tell you the PCB file is assembled as per the P&P file, potentially incorrectly. With the AOI program if a mistake is made then all the AOI machine is going to do is verify that all PCB's are assembled wrong but the same.

Using the Cluso First Article inspection System the engineer can desk check to P&P file against the BOM automatically. This will ensure that program contains all the components the customer designed to be placed on the PCB. Both the top and bottom side P&P files can be loaded into system and compared to BOM at the same time. This checked program can then stored stored as a Cluso file for use later at the FAI process. 

W using the Cluso system in Engineering these loopholes in the process are closed and ensure that the output of this Engineering process is 100% perfect.

Greg Ross

Cluso Vision Systems

greg@cluso.com.au