Commercial fire alarm design & manufacturing

POSITION

Senior Process Engineer

Overhauled production floor

• Established surface mount production department.
  • Performed cost benefit analysis by reviewing existing products and estimating costs for in house production.
  • Received approval from senior management and proceeded to bring production in house.
  • In conjunction with local and foreign suppliers, reviewed all equipment and selected based upon criteria determined from product, capacity, cost, quality and supplier service requirements.
  • Designed layout and prepared production floor – installed anti static flooring, three phase cabling and air for pneumatics.
  • Managed installation and start up with supplier.
  • Participated in training with SMT leader and supported through ramp up.
  • Phased in subcontracted product over a twelve month period and provided on going support to team leader.

• Plated Through Hole and Test Departments
  • Redesigned and installed lean flow lines moving away from workstations.
  • Eliminated test work in progress by testing immediately after assembly.
  • Moved away from kitting system and installed a two bin Kanban system alongside flow lines.
  • Established supermarket inventory control between plated through hole and assembly department. 5S applied, allocating a specific loaction to each subassembly thus aiding visual management and alerting supervisors to shortages.
  • Designed flow-lines using CAD and outsourced manufacture to metal fabricators.
  • All lines designed with ergonomics in mind – Task lighting added. Ergonomic carousels added. Specialist seating provided. Extraction installed.
  • All lines designed for mobility in future relayouts. All benches had lockable castors, electrical points and trunking for network cables incorporated into design.
  • To reduce noise, reduce costs, improve reliability and facilitate mobility all tooling was changed from pneumatic to electric.
  • Estimated annual savings in the range of $700k NZD.
  • Cycle times reduced from weeks to hours & days.
  • Reduced changeover time from 2 days to 15~30 minutes.
  • Sub-assembly variety doubled per month with no extra resources.
  • Established production key process indicators.
  • Established production schedules for SMT, Plated Through Hole and Final Assembly departments.
  • Established daily production meetings.
  • Spear headed project to design a software tool to store and present work instructions. This included bills of materials, quality instructions, quality hotspots and customer feedback.

• Final assembly

Lead time to the customer was reduced from a 10 working day average to a 4 day average. 80%of product was unique and custom built to customer order.This was achieved through a combination of the following improvements and initiatives:

• As localised parts supply ran low, technicians would spend a lot of traveling back and forth to stores topping up parts. A two bin kanban system was introduced to the floor eliminating the need for technicians having to collect inventory.
• Supply of subassemblies to the final assembly department was made reliable through the improvements made in Plated Through Hole and Test departments.
• A supermarket was established which dedicated a location to a specifica subassmbly. If the location was low or empty, this was a visual trigger to the staff a batch should be scheduled.
  • This ensured continual supply and allowed product to flow to the customer.
• A production schedule did not exist and the dept supervisor administered production on a first come, first served basis or by urgency demand from Sales. In conjunction with IT, Production management, Dept supervisor and Orders Incoming, I managed a project to develop a schedule using software. This provided visibility to the entire company including Sales branches providing the followng benefits:
  • Supervisor & operations team now had an accuarte tool to plan with.
  • Reduced phone calls from Sales and all other departments, allowing the team to concentrate on production.
  • With assembly times now being measured and used in a schedule, it allowed for accurate planning and communication. This reduced waste in time and with production now delivering sooner and faster then expected, confidence in the department increased thereby reducing unnecessary follow up calls.
• Work instructions did not exist. I managed a project to develop video based work instructions using the same software platform as used in the other departments. A permanent resource was dedicated to making these work instructions and they provided the following benefits.
  • The work instructions detailed the standard way of building a fire panel and improved quality.
  • The department supervisor had responsibility for training all his staff and with each technician taking months and years to train, it took a significant amount of his time. The highly detailed instructions drastically reduced the attention time required for each technician.
  • Quality improved as customer feedback could now be recorded and displayed to the assembly technician. This reduced errors and time for reworks.
• The department underwent a lean transformation programme. The following benefits were gained:
  • The department was trained in the principles and tools of Lean: 7 Wastes, Flow, Pull, 5S, Spaghetti maps and Visual management. This helped engage staff in future change and reduced resistance by increased understanding.
• Working with the Dept supervisor & Production manager, the layout of the department was redesigned to standardise workstations, add computers to each work station and define safe pathways. This improved safety and reduced travel time. 5S was designed into layout and prevented the accummulaton of clutter.
  • The department was designed with the potential to migrate from a workstation to a flow line methodology with reasonable ease.
• I designed kitting trolleys and introduced to production, saving technician travel time by eliminating repeated trips gathering larger metalwork.
• Sourced and purchased tools to adequately meet usage requirements by all staff.
• Worked directly with supplier to address quality issues such as poor paintwork, missing parts, scratches etc.
• Cables being crimped individually were converted to ribbon cables where possible. Working with local tool maker, I designed a cost effective crimp tool which allowed the bulk preparation of ribbon cables and installed onto the floor as Kanban.
• Sourced new supplier for graphic membranes and managed changeover. $180k NZD annual savings.

• Automated process for dispensing encapsulating material.
  • Selected machine that could deliver a 4ml shot size with +/-0.05ml accuracy.
  • Double reservoir system for mixing and dispensing a two part epoxy.
  • System utilised a disposable static mixing rod guaranteeing mix ratio before final dispense onto product.
  • Machine was chosen for automation capability and was later connected to an X/Y table via RS232. This significantly reduced the labour content of the encapsulation process.
• Managed project to source and qualify material for waterproofing product.

Participated in product re-design, working closely with our supplier to design the plastics in such a way as to prevent defects (sinking) occurring during injection molding.

 

Contract Electronic Manufacturing

POSITION

Project & Process Engineer

• Managed a $1million NZD customer order

– Project managed the manufacture of a high precision, military grade, range of products.

– Provided design for manufacture expertise and performed assembly research & design.

– Successfully delivered 60,000 high precision, shielded printed circuit boards.

– Setup incoming quality inspection and poke yoke quality checks throughout process, to verify stack up tolerance to ensure they met micro millimetre specification.

• Restructured Production

– Connected siloed departments allowing product to flow.

– Established cycle times supporting an accurate schedule.

– Reduced WIP from $700k NZD to $200k NZD over a 3-month period.

– Eliminated the need for an entire evening shift.

Commercial Intruder and Fire Security Systems

POSITION

Process Engineer

Held engineering responsibility for six production cells, from a total of eighteen.

Introduced 23 new products and 25 variants.

€180k direct annual cost savings.

Developed & implemented emergency evacuation framework.

Process Engineering

Improved product throughput by 40% in one cell. This was achieved analysing current and future state cell capacity using forecasted sales figures.

Time studies were performed and cycle times analysed to identify cell bottlenecks. The test cycle time was identified to be the bottleneck. The test station was programming the unit and then conducting the test. Cycle time was reduced by 20% with the introduction of a separate programming. This allowing a unit to be programmed whilst another was being tested.

Components were transferred away from manual insertion to automated insertion.

Kaizen was conducted, during which the cell capacity was doubled by creating two smaller cells on the same footprint.

The improvements reduced annual overtime requirements by 300 hundred hours and the finance department credited the project with €25,000 annual savings.

Annual savings of €155,000 were achieved in another cell by removing an unnecessary product component with an annual cost of €87,000, whilst other components were transferred to automated assembly with annual labour cost reduction of €68,000.

New Product Introduction

Accounting for 40% of my workload, new products needed to be introduced due to major expansion into the european market. Language variations and regulatory requirements were the main drivers.

Chairing a bi-weekly NPI meeting, I set up a clear communication channel to the overseas business units during a bi-weekly communications meeting. Clear timelines were established using a Gant chart.

Introducing a new product to the production floor required many subtasks to be accomplished, such as BOM verification, scheduling prototypes and pilots etc.

Production support

Providing support to the production floor was a daily priority. Issues were presented by Production Supervisors, Team leaders, Quality Inspectors, Line feeders and Debug Technicians on a daily basis.

For one particular cell, debug work in progress was reduced from €30,000 to €5000 in two months. Achieved by justifying and organising extra debug resources by running a training programme in conjunction with the overseas design engineer. Knowledge gained kept WIP at an acceptable level.

The company MRP system worked to a backflushing system which was later found to be administered incorrectly. This problem caused my deviations and drove many alternative component approvals. I circulated and managed these approvals to ensure BOM accuracy and product integrity.

I was the point of contact for all BOM, Assembly Instruction, Quality and DMI related queries.

Held responsibility to manage and control supplier quality, production quality and quality issues raised by the customer. Customer complaints were closed out within a 20 days period.

Production cell efficiency was maintained at 100%.

Quality

Attending class A defect meetings, I put into place corrective actions to resolve and prevent further defects occurring.

One example was a metal housing causing a 10% fallout. Working closely with the overseas suppliers, I reduced the this fallout to 1% over a nine month period. This was quite a challenge, because there was a 3 month lead time on the housings and many defects had already been shipped. I setup incoming inspection and removed faulty product before they could affect production efficiency.

Another example was a large capacitor burning through boards returned from the customer. The design department declared the design to be good, whilst the supplier also declared the component to be good. To resolve the issue, I sent out the capacitor to be analysed for electrolytic breakdown. This analysis pointed towards the boards design which yielded the board design to be at fault. Board design was updated and the problem was resolved.

EHS

Created a policy to implement and control Job Safety Analysis performed throughout the site.

Generated a process flow map and associated documentation to provide a guideline on how to select and prioritise jobs for analysis. The assigned team would than perform the analysis using OSHA methodology and record it on the company EHS intranet site.

Perform a biweekly EHS audit for a given area of the site.

This work contributed to the site receiving two very prestigious EHS awards. The GE Global Star and the Voluntary Protection Programme or VPP award.

 

Production of Integrated Circuits

POSITION

Test support technician

• Supported test technicians in the final test department
• Using Labview, I developed a method to automate the temperature calibration procedure for the 9308 microchip test handler.

Production of Integrated Circuits

POSITION

Cooperative education

• Rolled out software update to a platform of forty microchip test handlers and resolved all issues.

 Production of Integrated Circuits

POSITION

Probe Wafer Technician

• Operated a platform of wafer probe systems (Teradyne) working to a cleanroom specification
• Performed operator training
• High powered microscope inspection

Computer Assembly

POSITION

Shipping operator

• Working in a high pressure environment, loaded and manifested shipments for delivery to Ireland and Europe.