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34 The PCB Magazine • August 2017 CYCLE TIME REDUCTION THROUGH W.O.R.C. The final step was to route all "L" jobs and "Q" (quick turn) jobs through the Office W.O.R.C. Cell. It is critical that the type of jobs designed for the cell is of sufficient volume to sustain the cell; if not, the scope should be ex- panded. The key here is that the personnel in the cell are dedicated to only "L" and "Q" jobs with any downtime being spent cross training in the other cell functions to handle surges. Results The results were significant; cycle times on "L" & "Q" jobs through the "office" were re- duced from 12.5 days to 3 days, giving pro- duction an extra 9.5 days to actually build the product! Because these orders were no longer running through the standard office path, a col- lateral cycle time reduction benefit was also re- alized on "H" jobs. Collateral Benefits The proximity of the cell structure dramat- ically improved communication between all members, in real time. A byproduct was assim- ilation by the group of conversations between one person and a customer or employee, which created some synergy and team problem-solv- ing that wouldn't have existed before. Manufacturing Case Study: Company B Company B is a $17 million manufacturer of printed circuit boards serving the commer- cial, medical, telecom and military/aerospace market sectors. Company B reported a stagna- tion of improvement in on-time delivery over the past four years and has been unable to meet customer expectations for 95% or greater deliv- ery service level. TRAC was contracted to per- form a comprehensive business process assess- ment and develop a cycle time reduction imple- mentation plan. Routing Analysis The first step was to perform a Routing Anal- ysis to determine the mix of Company B's prod- uct, technology and processes. This critical first step would drive the direction for which of these three make the most sense to evaluate config- uring dedicated W.O.R.C. Cells. The results will typically point to one of the three, however, a combination of more than one may also make sense. Depending on how many part numbers a shop processes a day, three months of routings is usually sufficient for the analysis. A simple spreadsheet is usually the sim- plest tool for this exercise, listing all the possi- ble (major) process steps in the shop across the X-axis and Part Numbers on the Y-axis. It is im- portant to capture the layer count, raw mate- rial and technology in the analysis. Next, the spreadsheet was to be populated with the infor- mation from the routings (aka travelers, process sheets, etc.) collected from the sample months. An excerpt of this analysis is shown in Figure 4. Now comes the analysis part; what we are looking for is a significant percentage of the traveler routings that can be grouped into one of the following: A. short process routing sequence B. One particular material type C. One particular technology Note: A family of very similar routings/material/ technology can be combined into a single group if there is no appreciable difference. Review of the full data set revealed that 18% of the jobs processed through the shop use a standard FR-4 material set, and were 2- or 4-lay- er technology. This tells us a lot! We proceeded under the assumption that it makes sense to set Figure 3: Office W.O.R.C. cell.