The characterization of a clean room assembly process

In assembly task planning, numerous researchers have reported about the dev elopment of computer-aided design tools that generate and optimize valid as sembly sequences for a given product. However, all the promised benefits of the off-line assembly planning cannot be realized unless realistic and cre dible cost and complexity measurements of the assembly process are availabl e. This is the case, since the optimization and selection of the optimal as sembly sequence must be based on measurable and controllable characteristic s of the assembly process. This paper presents the findings of a cross-func tional team that was in charge of putting in place the design guidelines fo r the future assembly line of the small form factor hard disk drives (HDD's ). Keeping in mind that the factors affecting the characterization of an as sembly process depend greatly on the nature of the product, the market fore cast for the product, the production geographical location, and many other local and special constraints, we however, believe that a similar approach to the one reported in this paper can yield an acceptable set of measuremen ts that fan help the product development teams present more manufacturable products. The core of our work was based on a quality function deployment a pproach that included the construction of a house of quality. In addition t o the findings of the team, we describe the progressive stages that had to take place, from gathering the factory customers' wants and needs to organi zing the cross-functional team. We started with internal customers' needs f or the ideal HDD manufacturing process. Our internal customers represented manufacturing operators, process engineers, product developers, and manager s for all three groups. With a large group of participants from dependent f unctions that included cleaning, testing, assembly, product technology, man ufacturing engineering, and others, we derived the clean room assembly proc ess characteristics that are measurable and controllable to address our int ernal customers' needs.