Yield is a measurement of output versus input. In manufacturing, 100% yield would be the ideal scenario. However, in real world where there are impurities or resistance affecting yield, yield that hits above 98% is consider very good. Traditionally, manufacturers can observe what happened in the production floor with help of manual monitoring and repetitive work. Many have internal processes like MES (Manufacturing Execution System) to monitor and control production performance. However, these actions could be reactive and reporting formats could be different across platforms. Having an enterprise solution to collate and provide a common data format not only help in ease of data sharing, but also reduces the need for offline analysis.

MES vs Industry 4.0

There is much hype and great promise of Industry 4.0, where it is the trend of automation driven by data to enable the handling of everyday tasks. The everyday task in a factory is none other than making sure flow of production is smooth. Connected factory happens when data collected from tests and processes around the production floor or even across test locations worldwide is accessible, organized, saved, and securely stored. Data democratization bestows the ability to anyone who wants the ability to visualize and analyze every step of each process that a part went through in production. Any problem surfaced should be resolved at the current process, instead at end of line. Identification of root cause and which process to optimize should happen in matter of hours, instead of days or even weeks. Keysight’s PathWave Manufacturing Analytics (PMA) opens the portal and facilitates users to embark onto the superhighway of Industry 4.0.

Mechanics of Industry 4

A year after COVID-19 pandemic, many of us still hold hopes it will end in coming months and things to return normal. However, things are never going to be the same again and new normal is for us to embrace. Many industries and services have started to adopt digitization. For manufacturers, this will create a deeper divide between those who have just started the shift towards digitization and those who are already cruising on the superhighway. A study done by McKinsey shows remote work, supply-chain connectivity and operational transparency are major focus areas for Industry 4.0 in post COVID-19.

Major focus areas for Industry 4.0 technologies

Prior to the arrival of pandemic, an automotive component manufacturer adopted Keysight’s PMA as the core engine driving towards their Industry 4.0 journey and managed to make use of the solution effectively. For months, yield for its critical product remained at below its target of 90% and have been stagnant without improvement despite frequent downtime to clean test setups or shuffling testing across different machines. Therefore, its customers proposed to rebuild one of the two hardware. However, yield does not improve after spending thousands of dollars on the rebuild. Even with restricted movement into the factory, engineers of the manufacturer used Keysight’s PMA to perform remote monitoring on their test setups, where they were able to identify there is no yield improvement before and after rebuilding.

No yield improvement after rebuilding done in Q2

With the CPK alert feature in PMA, the responsible test name contributed to low yield was flagged. Upon further analysis, the automotive component manufacturer presented the data to its customer and convinced them there is no correlation between the test name and the hardware rebuild. Thus, this prevented further resource wastage to rebuild remaining hardware and reinforced confidence of their customers towards the component manufacturer.

Test result split across different hardware

Examination of test result including CPK by test names

With PathWave Manufacturing Analytics, users are able to receive updated alerts, perform analysis and apply correct actions to the test setups. This brings users closer to the reality of being there although not physically there, just like teleportation to different locations by touch of few buttons.

Tag: Performance Monitoring

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A step closer to teleportation using PathWave Manufacturing Analytics