OCTOBER 2018 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 33
Six Sigma Quality Goals and
Continuous Improvements
This high degree of automation eliminated
handling and other opportunities for defects
as well as oxide growth and contaminations.
The resulting process has an astoundingly high
yield with very low labor. Lean waste in the
form of water treatment is shown in Table 8
along with the return on investments (ROI).
Summary
Whelen Engineering's GreenSource Fabrica-
tion facility shows how Lean principles can go
together with green principles. Seventeen new
innovations in PCB manufacturing provide this
advantage. The results are lower costs (⅓ to ½
the cost compared to what Whelen was pay-
ing for boards from China), decreased lead
times (from 4 weeks to 2 days), prototype flex-
ibility on high-volume product lines, and im-
proved quality with no final inspection need-
ed. ROI for the entire project was only three
years while only utilizing 50% of the capacity
of the systems, allowing sizable growth oppor-
tunities and future cost reductions.
PCB007
Further Reading
1. Lean Definitions, www.lean.org/search/
2. Matties, B., & Bernas, B. Whelen Engineer-
ing Reduces Cycle Time by Building a New Au-
tomated PCB Factory, The PCB Magazine, Oc-
tober 2015.
3. Stepinski, A. The 21
st
Century PCB Facto-
ry—Designed to Eliminate Offshore Cost Ad-
vantages, The PCB Magazine, June 2016.
Happy Holden has worked in print-
ed circuit technology since 1970 with
Hewlett-Packard, NanYa/Westwood,
Merix, Foxconn and Gentex. He is cur-
rently a contributing technical editor
with I-Connect007. To read past col-
umns or to contact Holden, click here.
Figure 2: In registration control, we see how these steps are applied to the manufacturing process.
Table 8: Methods of chemical recovery to regenerate chemicals, minimize waste treatment,
and the ROI for such systems.
