Quality Control - Introducing Automated First Article Inspection Series

The Quality Control department is left to perform the duties spelled out by the QA people in their procedures and practices. When the QA department says they must perform a 100% First Article Inspection on all product coming out of SMT they are supposedly bound to do so however at times left with no time to do it. The pressure from production to get the lines moving again is incredible, as long as the lines are not producing, the company is not making money and their massive investment in high speed assembly equipment is laying idle. There is negotiating over the length of time it takes to perform FAI and guess who loses, management think that 1 hour is excessive for FAI and most believe it should only take 10-20 minutes tops.

The simple math is that a PCB that 500 parts on it and manually inspected can be broken down like this:

- 15  seconds to locate each part on the PCB by reference designator using the customers BOM

- 5 seconds to inspect part

- 500 parts X 20 seconds (above) = 10000 secs = 2.77 hrs.

This means that at a minimum using a manual FAI method this inspection will take almost 3 hours not including time to document and file results for traceability. A lot of management are not aware fo this and actually believe that it is a quicker process but these are the simple facts. I machines are run during this process an incredible risk ensues. The manual method checks for 2 things, that the PCB actually contains the parts that the customer requested by checking against the customer BOM and that the Pick and Place file has been converted from the BOM and CAD data properly at the same time.

Using the Cluso Automated FAI the time for the inspection exampled above is reduced to approx. 20 minutes. This is because the Automated FAI uses the P&P file and the customers BOM which has all of the coordinates and part descriptions in them so there is no time required to locate the parts and the full details of what the parts are is on the screen streamlining the whole process. The operator simply starts at the beginning of the dataset and steps through the parts passing or failing as they go. When they get to the end of the parts there is 100% confidence that all parts have been inspected. Also once complete the inspection can produce a report that details the parts inspected as well as failures encountered. The system can also store this inspection as a golden sample for subsequent inspections of the same assembly and the system can even archive the entire process including the scanned image, report and the dataset for full traceability. This wraps up this FAI process into a manageable, simple and fully traceable process that is 100% repeatable and foolproof.

As far as the QA aspects we are discussing using Automated FAI fulfils all requirements of the Quality control plans which are that the inspection is 100% and the traceability of the process is 100%. As well it performs this with a massive time reduction saving money at the same time. The ROI on this type of equipment is measure in months or even weeks in some cases after which it is money in the bank. The QC department finally have a way to perform the 100% inspections demanded from them in the time allocated by the their supreme commanders. 

What more could you ask for.

Greg Ross

Cluso Vision Systems