"Conveyor To Be Solution" - 6/1/03

by Rodney Miller, VP Manufacturing

In today's electronic manufacturing environment, key topics for cost reductions, stem from process development. OEM's and EMSI (Electronic Manufacturing Service Industry) providers are in alignment that the common factors are flexibility and faster response time. It is not uncommon for the Electronic manufacturers to be inundated by the latest manufacturing trend names for manufacturing system development.

Some of which you may be familiar with: Single board lot size, Demand flow, Quality Functional Deployment, Asynchronous Process Manufacturing, and the list goes on…

At Tri-onics, we too are moving toward process improvement and sticking to the fundamentals of improved process flow. Our company direction and needs are driven by our customers. As the mix of product changes, so do we. This makes our goal of automation increasingly challenging.

We evaluated our process on the floor and focused on two areas of development, process simplification and automation for reducing cycletime. Our direction was to implement a new simplified system of assembling printed circuit assemblies. The solution was concluded to be progressive build conveyor. The conveyor is an eight station pre-solder wave system. In the process of setting up the line our Implementation team eliminated several non-value added steps from our production process. In addition the team restructured the layout of our production facilities to allow for a more efficient flow of product through the process.

We have seen improvements in cycle time, training time, first pass acceptance, and labor efficiency. Our future will be to further develop our conveyor line processes to improve the scheduling and cycle time resulting in increased customer responsiveness and least cost to use.
 

"Tri-onics Goes the Extra Mile" - 1/2/03

by Rodney Miller, VP Manufacturing

In this day of competition we find ourselves striving for success for both ourselves and our customers. On occasion, Tri-onics has an opportunity to work closely with the customer on issues that seem to be elusive. We welcome these challenges and look to provide a solution that is both cost effective and simple to implement.

One of our customers has a product that will run uninterrupted when power is no longer available. This is an important part of the design, and a critical feature for their customers. So, when a memory problem occurred, we immediately looked for a solution. Our concern was not whether it was a manufacturing or design issue, but how we could provide a solution as soon as possible.

It appeared the charging circuit for the battery was continuing to drain during the storage and transportation to the customer. Product Service Technician Dale Eccles and Production Technician Dan Hund took it upon themselves to to look for the core cause and recommend a solution. Following much time and analysis, Eccles stated, "The circuit is not designed to turn off and will continue to drain the battery until it is completely dead and risking the possibility of reversing the cell." Confident, Dan and Dale verified this with our Design Engineering Department.

The group then looked at the current configuration. The design contained unused terminal block positions The idea was to jumper the battery into use via the unused terminal posts. Though not a preferred solution by the customer, it gave our customer a cause and initiated the dialogue required for a permanent solution.

The value that we provide our customers and their customers goes well beyond the initial unit selling price. This is just one way that we have been working toward contributing to our customers’ success, and that is exactly what we are here to do.
 

"Tri-onics Earns An A+" - 11/15/97

Customer letter reprinted by permission.

John, please accept my appreciation on behalf of (our company) for the efforts and dedication displayed by the Tri-onics team in providing us exceptional service and high quality products in a timely fashion. Electronic assemblies have historically been a difficult and high maintenance commodity for us. Tri-onics' thorough approach and emphasis on doing everything right the first time, with state of the art equipment and processes, and excellent personnel, have provided (our company) with several months of ZERO defects in all areas. This has allowed us to redeploy time formerly spent on problems, into continual improvement. The results for our company have been dramatic and incredible! I want to emphasize that I do not commonly use superlatives like this, but Tri-onics has earned and A+. Thank you again for making us look good in 1997! We look forward to building the partnership started with Tri-onics over the last 18 months.

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