Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1361971
62 PCB007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2021 growing in automotive electronics; high lay- er count and anylayer are moving beyond the high end with progress in AI; and size/weight compression throughout electronics supply chains. Wus has performed several plant col- laboration benchmarking exercises to prepare each plant to upgrade its proficiency and ca- pabilities. ese are needs-dependent as they tend to take a lot of engineering, manufactur- ing, and quality resources over several months' time. In addition, Wus has a Corporate Reliabili- ty Team that benchmarks key processes, test technologies, Finite Elemental Analysis tech- niques, and material/product modeling across the business units, suppliers, and industry to prepare Wus for next generation develop- ments. Customers also provide interesting bench- marking opportunities. Some customers di- rectly show us how we compare to our com- petitors for quality, cost, delivery, responsive- ness, and of course, this is quite valuable. What is more interesting and deeper is the informa- tion that is gleaned from customer question- naires, spec changes, complaints, and audits. And sometimes quality alerts are sent out by customers to avoid having similar problems at our plants. is intelligence is fed through our engineering, manufacturing, maintenance and quality teams to upgrade and improve as prob- lem avoidance and prepares higher level ca- pabilities years before customers actually de- mand them. Q: Where specifically have you gained yield improvement from these many benchmark- ing activities? A: Supplier management is one successful program. For key suppliers, we provide month- ly scorecards and along with supplier specif- ic improvement programs leverage the cross- supply chain information to drive defects out of the supply chain. is isn't a one-way street. For example, Wus has ongoing drives for im- proved cleanliness and yields related to lami- nation processes. e improvement method- ology is shared with laminate suppliers to as- sist in their improvement efforts (as well as used internally across BUs). e combined laminate supplier and Wus in- ternal benchmarking cleanliness/lamination improvement efforts have been key elements of a five-year effort in our automotive BU to re- duce incidents by nearly 80% and has led to in- ternal electrical test foreign material shorts cut by about 50%. Q: What about scrap reduction? A: Wus has a couple of cooperative partner- ships which highlight this well. One is the Sch- weizer-Wus HF technology/sales partnership. Schweizer is a high-quality German PCB man- ufacturer key to developing the automotive ra- dar market. We have been working together for about seven years and have performed nu- merous benchmarking efforts aligning equip- ment capability, test methodology, engineer- ing disciplines, and pre-production engineer- Todd Johnson