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KIC Earns Calsonic Facility Regional Quality Award
By Rod Sampson, Process Engineer, Calsonic Kansei
alsonic Kansei is a multinational automotive parts manufacturer with its own branded OEM products. Recently, the company was acquired by the private equity firm KKR and is poised for dynamic global outreach. The company’s main production focus is on quality, closely fol- lowed by cost-effectiveness. This is no sur- prise for any company operating in the au- tomotive industry and the highly competi- tive EMS market.
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Quality and cost-effectiveness are mu- tually reinforcing. Poor quality can quickly become expensive, especially in the automo- tive segment where rework is undesirable for most products and altogether unacceptable for certain processes. Implementing a solu- tion for controlling and tracking the reflow process, while optimizing productivity through maximum equipment utilization was the reason Calsonic’s Lewisburg, Ten- nessee, plant won the company’s overall process/quality improvement competition.
Finding the Ideal Profile
For each new product introduction (NPI), the company runs design of experiments (DOE) to identify the “sweet spot” in the thermal process. This typically entails experimenting with machine settings that result in a profile in the high, low and center points of the process window. Cal- sonic’s headquarters provides the appropriate process window. When the best process is identified, it is locked in place and tracked and verified daily. While defects are rarely attributed to the re- flow process, the challenges that are encountered when defects actually do occur are often more dif-
KIC’s Vantage database software helps Rod Sampson, process engineer at Calsonic, access process data quickly.
is the case, the impact of thermal and external de- fects on a business is minimized, positively driving overall factory productivity.
The recent trend to aggressively reduce sol- der voids has made process optimization and con- sistent soldering critical for Calsonic’s success. Previously, this work was time-consuming and al- though the quality was acceptable, productivity and cost-effectiveness suffered, due to the amount of line stoppage. It was challenging for the compa- ny, because it had numerous generations of reflow
ficult to resolve. Quality is not something that should be weighted differently by process, as the various weights have little importance once an as- sembly is rendered defective.
All respective processes should be considered the most crucial from a quality standpoint. If this
ovens and wave solder machines. Not only do their thermal properties differ, but the older machines made performance tracking difficult. In today’s age with virtually unlimited information available at the click of a mouse button, its method was outdat- ed and inadequate.
Smart Thermal Profiling
The company researched the market and found new technologies that seemed promising. One was a smart thermal profil- er with predictive process optimization soft- ware that allowed the company to input the process window target and immediately identify the corresponding machine settings. This cut down the company’s opti- mization time dramatically and allowed it to find more optimal process settings than in the past. Previously, the company had relied on technicians performing manual process verifications on each line, multiple times per day.
This was less than ideal, because such manual verification is not consistent and it reduced productivity by stopping the entire line for 10 or more minutes every time a verifica- tion profile was run on a reflow oven. Additional verification events were prompted by yield issues, preventive maintenance work, and unscheduled line stoppage. The company’s proce- dures require running a profile if the line stoppage exceeds four hours. A secondary concern was that it had no thermal process information during the pro- duction between the twice-daily manual profiles. The company decided to invest in KIC’s auto-
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February, 2019
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