Case Studies

Case Study 1: Can your vendor really do the job? How will you know?

Our client had a design that involved joining two plastic parts using ultrasonic welding. The integrity of the joint was critical to the function of the product. An injection molding vendor was selected based on his familiarity with ultrasonic welding. Prototype samples appeared to meet the design expectations. However, soon after launch, joint failures were discovered by customers. The product launch was abruptly cancelled to stem the tide of customer returns and to allow a remedy to be put in place.

Case Study 2: Do you really understand your product’s reliability requirements?

A client designs and manufactures sealed electronics units used in rugged environments. The design team was working on a new product for a large customer. It was similar to past products, with one difference – it had to pass a corrosion test that was different compared to previous tests. As it turned out, the new corrosion test was more aggressive that the old tests. However, this was unknown when the first set of prototypes were built using the same materials used in past products. The prototypes failed the test when the seal degraded and leaked during exposure to the corrosion conditions. Product verification tests were just a few months away and the customer was very concerned.

Case Study 3: Improving Manufacturing Quality – What’s the Root Cause?

A client makes high reliability steel components that were failing an inspection test at the last step of a complicated, multi-step fabrication process. The test was used to identify the presence of defects over a certain size. The failed samples had to be thrown away, resulting in a loss of $500 per sample. About 100 parts had been thrown away and several batches of parts were on hold, waiting for disposition. It was assumed that the quality of the incoming steel bars was at fault. A great deal of time and money was spent trying to get the supplier to improve the steel quality. This was getting them nowhere.

Case Study 4: Are you really working on the right problem?

A client was developing a new product for its customer, which was a large company. The product contained a subassembly that was required to cycle at least 50,000,000 times. The mechanism included a shaft that slid in and out of a bearing. Several test units failed to meet the requirement. The engineers focused on the lubrication between the shaft and bearing as the root cause of the problem. Also, the subassembly supplier made recommendations about the materials to use for the shaft and bearing to solve the problem. They spent several months pursuing both approaches, without any success.

Case Study 5: Eliminating the risk of change

An electronics manufacturer has four high volume assembly plants that used three old-technology solder pastes to join electrical components to circuit boards. The circuit boards were used in high reliability products. Acme wanted to replace the solder pastes with a single solder paste. Newer solder pastes were identified that offered better properties, and at a lower cost. The project team just needed to convince the customers and the manufacturing engineers at the assembly plants that a change was low risk.

Case Study 6: Finding hidden costs

A client had been manufacturing electric power devices for over 20 years, using the same set of materials and manufacturing processes during this time. figure1_contactcasestudy

The device included a subassembly consisting of two metal components that were resistance welded as shown in the figure. The top component was an electrical contact that contained a precious metal that added considerable cost to the component. The challenge was to find a way to reduce the cost of the component without impacting the performance and reliability of the product.

Other Projects

Here is a list of past projects with brief descriptions. The projects include product development, cost reduction, process development, competitive analysis, and failure analysis projects. They are grouped according to the project focus.