Standardized Traceability Ratings for Manufacturing

摘要

Traceability and process control are no longer requirements reserved for manufacturers in regulatory or specific market segments. Today, all manufacturers who aspire to achieve or to maintain a 'world class' status must deliver some degree of traceability. The PCB assembly industry lacked a common language regarding the nature of traceability or its levels. Nor has there been a means to benchmark such capability or to communicate its nature to customers or regulatory agencies in a common manner. Recently, we, in collaboration with a leading supplier of dummy components and process testing kits, partnered together to offer an innovative kit designed to validate and benchmark the entire manufacturing process and provide the potential for rich product and process traceability detail. This new kit provides the physical materials and the procedural guide to determine a factory's traceability and control capability, and then rate the results in a formalized matrix. These ratings can be used to demonstrate capabilities, communicate to customers or auditors, or to provide a start point for manufacturers to improve their capabilities and track progress along the way. This materials kit and ratings methodology aids manufacturers the demand-side of the market in the following ways: 1. Benchmark Traceability and Control Test and validate three key elements of traceability; exercising quality manufacturing practices control mechanisms to assure process execution of these practices is proper even under high-change conditions, and the resultant reporting scope and depth that serve as evidence of the practices and controls performed. This approach of validating process control and visibility yields a comprehensive assessment of a factory's capabilities. 2. Communicate Capabilities Using both the elements of the methodology and the metrics derived from an audit when it is applied, manufacturers have the means to convey to their customers or auditors their true traceability capability. In the past, this has been impossible without a common rating system or even a generalized agreement on the maximum range of what traceability entails. The purpose of this kit is to establish a common rating on the scale from simple traceability to world class capabilities. The scale can then be used to communicate a factory's capabilities in a uniform mariner to management and external parties that require this information. 3. Improve What is Measured The rating scale aids manufacturers who are continuously looking for ways to improve their factory operations. Through uniformed measurements, a road map can be developed to advance a plant's manufacturing processes, controls, and traceability. By measuring a factory's capabilities today, this kit aids in defining path to the future. 4. Technical Basis Aegis' methods of rating traceability have been concurrently developed with, and adopted by, many of the leading manufacturers in the industry. The collective challenges and experiences of a customer base exceeding 1000 corporations on five continents have contributed to the scope of the methodology. Users of the method and kit consequently benefit from over seven years of definition and usage in factories all over the world to rate systems and processes against this scale.