Commitment To Quality
Customer: Leading Manufacturer of complex systems in the transportation industry.
Location: ECI supports our customers globally, and analysis was performed at ECI’s facility in Toronto.
Challenge
Constraints
Inconsistent Performance
Our customer was experiencing inconsistent performance from a portion of their assembly, which includes electronics and cables.
Critical Components
This failure was on a critical system component, required for proper functionality of our Customer’s product
Limited Guidance
The performance failures were inconsistent, therefore our customer had limited guidance on failure modes.
Limited Control On Sub-Tier Processes
ECI is acting as system integrator of multiple sub-assemblies, and does not control all sub-tier processes.
Lack Of Control On Materials
This product is a Customer owned design, and ECI does not control the Bill of Materials or suppliers or critical components and assemblies.
Time-Cost Sensitive
This is a high volume product and the impact of the failure grows significantly as time progresses with no solution.
Assemblies Produced Per Year
Components 3D X-Rayed
Root Cause, Supported By Data And Analysis
The Solution
- Upon notification of the issue, ECI put many of our Quality tools to work. ECI’s Quality Management System (QMS) is registered to ISO9001:2015, ISO13485, and AS9100D. Our QMS dictates the standard non-conforming material process, and ensures we determine root causes and implement appropriate containment and corrective actions. In this case, both the strength of our process and expertise of our staff helped unearth the issue.
- Our investigation revealed that the intermittent performance came from one of the sub-assemblies that ECI was procuring from a directed source.
- Because we believe in data, both for our own guidance and as its own storyteller, we performed a full 8D investigation, and leveraged our broad base of internal test equipment to do it. In this case, we used our 3D X-Ray capability to perform systemic analysis on failed components to discover a manufacturing defect in a specific encapsulated component. We then used our electronic, soldering, and quality expertise to guess (we eventually learned correctly) the manufacturing process being used and then referenced our lessons learned to provide a recommendation.
- When we had come to our conclusions internally, we approached both our customer and supplier with the findings, as well as a process change recommendation for our supplier’s process.
The Conclusion
- Our ability to estimate a failure based on our experience, together with our 3D X-Ray capability, test and analysis discipline, and robust quality culture, provided a relatively speedy and straightforward fix to what began as a confounding problem.
- We challenged assumptions about ‘traditional’ thinking, and took a systemic and informed approach using our tools and expertise.
Industry Certifications
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