Case Study: An Improvement of Inspection Approach of Printed Multilayer Circuit Products Related to Visual Based Inspection Technique

Product quality is an important issue in all manufacturing industry nowadays to meet the customers’ requirement. In this regard, most of the factory has a special department namely Quality Control (QC) Department which control the product quality. The studied factory is a flexible printed circuit board manufacturer which is located in Bayan Lepas, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia. QC Department of the studied factory has high amount of work-in-progress (WIP). Therefore, the products have to be sent out to subcontractors for quality inspection. However, this method is not economically effective. Hence, the objective of this study was to develop an improved inspection method which will reduce the overall inspection time of the current inspection method (CIM). By reducing the inspection time, productivity of the department will increase and subsequently reduce the amount of WIP. This study is focused on the improvement of one product only. Before the improved inspection method (IIM) of the selected product was developed, performance of the CIM was evaluated by using one of the graphical productivity analysis charting techniques which is flow process chart. It was found that the IIM was able to reduce the inspection time of whole inspection process by 85.06 sec for every 12 panels inspected.