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Setting up Routings for Quality Data Collection

You have a number of choices regarding the exact point of quality data collection. Through collection triggers, you can tie a very specific point in your routing to quality data collection, thus ensuring that quality results are recorded as soon as they become available, and quality problems are caught as soon as they become evident.

In setting up your routings and planning your quality collection, you should consider the following key questions:

The answers to these questions should help you determine how to set up your routings and collection triggers. Keep them in mind as you read on.

The following are examples of how you might set up your routings to support meaningful integration with Oracle Quality via collection triggers. They are designed to show you how you might address some of the same issues that may arise during the set up process.

Routing 1: Planned Inspection, All Assemblies

If you are performing inspections on 100% of your assemblies at key points in your assembly, you would likely set up inspection operations as part of your assembly's routing. The Defect Code Pareto Analysis business example for the RF transmitter manufacturer used this kind of approach.

The inspection operation needs to be last in the routing because 100% inspection is required. Making the inspection the last operation ensures that all of your assemblies, including those that may need to be reinspected if any debugging or reworking has taken place, are inspected because all assemblies must pass through the To Move step of the last operation before they can be completed. Your debug operation should not be a count point operation, and as such, should not be the last operation on your routing.

Since all of your assemblies must go through the inspection operation, this operation should be a count point operation. Defining the collection trigger as a move into the To Move step of the inspection operation ensures that the results are entered when the inspection work at the operation is done and the assemblies are ready to move on, either into Inventory or to the debug operation. Triggering results collection off an a move into the last intraoperation step of the operation helps ensure that the qualified personnel at the inspection operation enters the inspection results. Note that the move that triggers the quality data collection could be an intraoperation move, as shown in the diagram, but could also be an interoperation move straight into To Move of the inspection operation.

You should use the Update Quality Results window to update the results records with appropriate defect and disposition codes. You can access this window through the Oracle Quality menu.

Routing 2: Planned Inspection, Some Assemblies

If inspection is part of your standard routing for an assembly, but only a fraction of your assemblies actually go through inspection, you may want to use the following routing model:

The medical compound manufacturer in the Yield Reporting example used this particular model. While this routing contains similar steps as the previous example, the key difference is that not all assemblies are inspected. Therefore neither the inspection nor the disposition operations should be count point operations. This means that if you do a move transaction from operation 10, operation 30 (i.e. the next count point operation) is defaulted as your "to" operation. You should override the default for those assemblies that are to be inspected.

A move into the To Move step of your inspection operation can once again serve as the collection trigger for results entry.

Routing 3: Exception Reporting

You may want to capture quality information only when there is a quality problem. You may also want to give employees at every point on the routing the authority to report a quality problem, regardless of whether the operation is an inspection operation. The simplest way to support this need would be to use the following routing:

In other words, you simply use your regular routing, and define a collection trigger to fire on move into the Scrap intraoperation step. You can make this specific to one or several operations, or use the same trigger to fire whenever a move to Scrap is entered.

Similarly, you could define moves into Reject to be a collection trigger for quality results entry.

Routing 4: In-line Debug / Rework

If your product and processes support in-line rework, that is, if you can sometimes fix an assembly at a designated rework operation, you may want to concentrate on recording quality data pertaining to the assemblies you are reworking. For example, you may want to capture historical information about serialized assemblies. You may also do the detailed analysis of the cause of the defect at the rework center, and consequently you want to report this information there.

The rework operation should not be a count point operation, since you do not expect to be moving all assemblies into the rework operation. The example shows two collection triggers associated with the rework operation, one fires when you move into the Queue of the rework operation from any other operation, the other fires when you do an intraoperation move to the To Move step of the operation. The first collection plan, P1, might have the Employee ID, the operation sequence or resource ID of the machine where the defect was discovered, and a free text description of the problem captured at the source, and it may invoke an action rule to alert the rework center that a failed assembly is on its way. This could be particularly relevant if the rework operation is in another building, or tends to get overloaded. P2 may include more detailed information, i.e. information that becomes available after some analysis has been done at the rework operation.

The advantage of using two collection plans rather than using one and updating it, is that you can invoke both collection plans through collection triggers. If you used one collection plan, as in the previous example, you would have to update it to enter the results of your analysis by accessing the Update Quality Results window through the menu. The advantage of having only one collection plan, on the other hand, is that results are typically displayed by collection plan.

See Also

Overview of Routings

Creating a Routing

Overview of Routings and Operations

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