New Product Introduction: Reduce The Risk of Failure

New Product Introduction (NPI) is the highest risk portion of your product life cycle. Investment cannot be recouped until the product is able to be manufactured in volume, yielding at the right level of performance, reliability and cost.

Exacerbating this risk is the growing complexity and integration of electronics systems in today’s products

Medical device technology is using more highly integrated semiconductor technologies, and field failures can be extremely costly, if not catastrophic

NPI Risks

NPI manufacturing risks fall into three categories:

1. Line Failures. These are due to assembly, testing, supplier reliability, or product manufacturability  issues.

2. On-time Delivery Failures. These are due to manual data collection and tracking, and lack of visibility to product assembly cycle times.

3. Field Failures. These are due to poor product reliability, and/or product performance.

The ability to track product genealogy down to a unit level is critical to addressing these three categories. Product needs to be tracked through all stages of the assembly process, along with supplier component source and performance data, assembly and test stations used, and the environmental conditions measured while going through various processes.

Unfortunately, most systems in today’s factories still operate as islands, not fully connected to the IT infrastructure, lacking the ability to capture and store the required data for full product traceability.

So the majority of production floor operations use spreadsheets and paper. This is an expensive and time consuming layer of ‘human glue’, limiting the ability to scale and automate data collection, and instead increasing overall engineering costs and time to market.

Solution

One solution is to drive vendors of assembly and test systems to open up their software for expanded data collection and integration with back end databases. Data collection must be relevant and portable. No longer can data be locked up on an assembly system, only to be forced to pay additional license fees, and still not be able to access the data via other more.

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