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Six Sigma Case study for external failure analysis - How does Omnex do it?

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The future state would require breakthrough improvements. In order to begin the improvements, Company X and Omnex agreed that the initial focus would be to streamline the FA Lab and revise the process to complete the 7-step Corrective Actions once the Failure Mode was determined.

In order to improve the FA Lab process performance, a three-step plan was developed.

Streamlining the FA Lab

Step One:

Omnex established a plan to reduce the FA Lab RMA backlog. The Program Managers were instructed to notify their customers and determine which products could be sampled during analysis rather than every part. The FA Lab Supervisor was instructed to only perform failure analysis on the backlog. Engineering was instructed to perform failure analysis using their own Engineering Technicians on all incoming products as of a particular date. The FA Lab Supervisor began reporting the backlog performance of the FA Lab and Engineering on a daily basis to the Quality Director and to Omnex.

Step Two:

Omnex established a plan to improve the competencies of the FA Lab and Engineering technicians. In order to improve these competencies, it was necessary to develop a process to collect and share the technicians' technical knowledge. This would ultimately improve the quality of analysis and reduce the lead time to assign failure modes. Company X decided to develop a Visual Basic program that would instruct technician’s step-by step which tests to perform in order to reach the correct failure mode. The program time stamps each step of failure analysis so a standard time may be established and individual technician performance may be measured.

Step Three:

Omnex developed a technician scheduling tool so that the FA Lab Supervisor could plan each day's work. The FA Lab's new objective would be a 24 hour turn-around for determining the failure mode. The Supervisor would be able to determine when Customer Returns would be delivered to the FA Lab and could then notify the Quality Director (his supervisor) when he predicted he could not meet his objective.

Within six months of initiation, the result of this plan will be zero overtime dollars spent in the FA Lab for failure analysis and a zero RMA backlog.

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