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Cost of Wave Soldering Defects at Your Facility

By: eddy.a

Fragmentation:

How many boards are scrapped per week or per month? What are the direct materials costs of the boards Scrapped? For example, a plant that scraps 7 boards per week with a direct materials cost of $41.00 and 4 boards per week at
$106.00 is losing at least $711.00 per week due to scrapping alone, or about $35,550.00 annually.

TOUCH-UP:

How many boards are handled per week by the wave soldering machine for the purpose of touch-up? Better yet, combine that with how many joints are touched up, on average per board. For example, if a plant assembles 2000 printed circuit boards per week and 5%are touched up, that means 100 boards are at issue weekly. If there is an average of three joints in need of touch-up on each of these boards, that mean that 300 joints are touched up weekly? Using the convention that the direct cost of touch-up per joint is $4.00; the plant is losing $1,200.00 per week due to touch-up alone, or about $60,000.00 annually.

REWORK:

On a per joint, per chip and per board basis, rework is far more expensive than even touch-up. If the sample plant discussed here performs rework on only 1% of its boards, that means that 20 boards per week (2000 boards x 1%) are experiencing rework, or 1000 boards annually. Using the convention that the direct cost of rework per joint is $12.00, the plant is losing $240.00 per week due to rework alone, or about $12,000.00 annually.

MORE COSTS:

The weakness in all of these calculations of financial loss is that they do not even begin to take into account the true cost of wave solder defects. This includes the reduction in throughput, management and engineering time fighting wave solder problems, downtime, the aggravation and staff distraction that entails, and the cost of ineffective or partial attempts to improve the wave solder process. Further, joints that have gone through touch-up and rework are weaker than joints that are wave soldered properly in the first place, thus being prone to fail sooner in the field.

FUTILITY OF INSPECTION:

One of the most obvious points is that at normal levels of wave solder joint inspection the inspector is at best sampling the quality of the joints on each board and, from the external appearance of the joints, assessing the chances that a satisfactory result has been achieved on all of them. This assessment of each and every joint is obviously ridiculous; all defects can never be identified before boards leave the plant. Therefore, the responsibility for high quality PCBs lies with the assembly process, not with inspection.

FIELD FAILURES:

This combined triple threat of touch-up, rework and inspection by sampling leads to failure at test and - most damaging of all - product failures in the field. As an OEM you’re servicing an internal customer. As a contract manufacturer you’re competing to retain customers and competing to attract new ones.

Article Source: http://www.articlekingpro.com

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