An interactive variation risk management environment to assess the risk of manufacturing variations

Recently, many manufacturing industries have adopted the methods of “Key Characteristics” (KCs) to identify and analyze product and process critical attributes which need extra control on several levels: product, assembly, sub-assembly, part and process to trace manufacturing variations. Manufacturing variations are those unwanted deviations from nominal values which significantly impact product’s quality, performance and cost. However, those manufacturers face some challenges in the implementation of such procedures. This is due to lack of quantitative models to prioritize those (KCs) and quantify their associated risk of variation. Therefore, there is a need for proactive quantitative mechanisms which incorporate knowledge about the current process capability by communicating Process Capability Data (PCD) during the early design stages to reduce design’s sensitivity to manufacturing variations. The present work builds a systematic interactive environment between the design model and the current process capabilities to analyze PCD which processed and stored in designated databases along with proactive mechanisms to capture the impact of manufacturing variations on performance. It prioritizes and quantifies expected future variations due to possible deviations of the design parameters from their nominal values to assess the related risk of variation. This study comes under the broadest risk management procedure to establish for a novel variation risk management methodology works in an interactive design and manufacturing environment. A case study of a connector beam for an edge card has been carried out successfully to prove the effectiveness of the present methodology in quantifying manufacturing variations and assessing their associated risk of variation.