Hirokazu Shibata

Global Assembly Quality Methodology: a New Method for Evaluating Assembly Complexities in Globally Distributed Manufacturing Hirokazu Shibata

Supplying high-quality products to markets is an essential mission of manufacturers. The recent globalization of mass production has led to lower prices for consumers and potentially higher profit for manufacturers. However, inadequate quality management severely increases quality costs as well as negatively impacting on a company¿s brand image. Traditional statistical quality control has not provided any definite guidelines for dealing with sporadically-occurring assembly defects. This book introduces newly developed metrics for assembly complexity. A process-based complexity factor is derived from a time standard defined for a set of assembly tasks, and shows satisfactory correlation with defect rates for each assembly step. A design- based complexity factor is derived from the DFA method for rating ease-of-assembly to augment factors not captured by the process-based complexity factor. Integrating these complexity factors not only alerts product designers of deficiencies in the original design concept, but also enables manufacturing engineers to take proactive measures for potential highly error-prone assembly processes.