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August 2017 • The PCB Magazine 37 provement in OTD, but what about the im- provement in other jobs? Removing the 2- and 4-layer jobs from the standard production pro- cess freed up capacity in all departments and resulted in improved delivery across the board. The bump in yield was attributed entirely to the W.O.R.C. Cell jobs, as the three-person team totally owned product quality from start to finish. Conclusion Employing W.O.R.C. methodologies to ap- ply the best of all worlds from the current tool set will improve the critical performance met- rics of on-time delivery, cycle-time, lead-time and yield. This combined improvement will also result in greater customer satisfaction and new business opportunities that directly im - pact bottom-line profitability. Implementing W.O.R.C. takes work (pun intended), discipline and some expense, but under the right condi- tions, the payback can be spectacular! PCB Steve Williams is the president of The Right Approach Consulting LLC. To read past columns, or to contact Williams, click here. CYCLE TIME REDUCTION THROUGH W.O.R.C. In the 1990s, the National Bureau of Stan- dards was distributing a popular statistical docu- ment, Experimental Statistics — National Bureau of Standards Handbook 91, originally written by Mary Natrella of the NBS Statistical Engineering Laboratory in 1963. A request by Patrick Spagon of the Statistical Methods Group of SEMATECH, a consortium of major U.S. semiconductor manu- facturers, to update Handbook 91, led to the cre- ation of a project team from NIST and SEMAT- ECH to create a new web-based, statistical e- handbook including sta- tistical software. The goal of the NIST/ SEMATECH e-Handbook of Statistical Methods (also called the Engineering Statistical Handbook), is "to help scientists and engineers incorporate statistical methods into their work as efficiently as possible," according to the website. It is intend- ed to assist engineers and scientists in develop- ing their own expertise, design their own experi- ments, and use the appropriate statistical analysis. Numerous case studies are integrated into the text and designed to work with the statistical soft- ware, DATAPLOT, available for free download in the "Tools & Aids" section. A fill-in-the-blank worksheet with sample data allows the user to quickly and easily duplicate the calculations with his or her own data. To make the software as use- ful as possible, it is available for seven operating systems. To read the entire column, which includes a download link to Handbook 91, click here. Happy's Essential Skills: Tip of the Month— The NIST/SEMATECH e-Handbook of Statistical Methods