High-Tech Industry

Location: Palo Alto, CA

Overview: 

Company X is a provider of high-end computing power to industry. One of Company X major supplier partners was responsible for producing the main board for their new server line. The design is extremely challenging and owned by Company X. History had shown a number of quality problems with this main board that repeated over time. Company X looked to SQA as an outsourcing partner who could provide an effective and technically viable solution to investigating these issues utilizing SQA’s Process Science Engineering diagnostic tool.

Objectives:

The scope of this assignment was to apply SQA’s holistic diagnostic tool known as Process Science Engineering (PSE) to the manufacturing processes used by the supplier. SQA was responsible for the content of the assessment and for delivery of a plan to assist the supplier to overcome the identified issues.

Results:

SQA assembled a team of process experts to perform the assessment, perform analysis of the resultant data, and recommend practical process changes that could prevent the recurrence of the identified quality issues and those issues discovered during the assessment by not yet resulting in quality escapes. The main board is a 40-layer printed circuit with a physical size of approximately 4’ X 4’. After successfully applying the templates of the PSE assessment is was discovered that the issues contributing to the quality issues were related only to the manufacturing controls being utilized and not the complex technology involved. This resulted in recommendations being made to implement control mechanisms on the identification and traceability of materials, material testing, change management, tool control, and packaging processes for this product. A significant finding of the assessment was that certain of the identified issues were caused by the customer’s change management practices. This was brought to management’s attention with recommendation on process changes to eliminate these issues.