TABLE OF CONTENTS Ronald Lasky
Cookson Performance Solution
Daniel Baldwin
Georgia Institute of Technology
Brian Lewis
Siemens USA
Joe Belmonte
Cookson Performance Solutions
Electronics has become the largest industry in the world at $1 trillion per year. It has grown at four times the rate of the gross domestic product of the countries in which it exists. Hence it is the industry of choice for developing nations to accelerate the establishment of strong economies.
As electronic assembly matures, there is no more critical issue than productivity. If productivity worldwide were increased by only 5 percent, the $1 trillion dollar electronics business would produce an extra $50 billion worth of products. One of the keys to improving productivity is to use the most effective metrics to track a facility s productivity. This chapter will propose some of these metrics that resulted from a productivity investigation performed by Cookson Electronics, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Siemens Electronic Assembly Equipment.
In order to better understand the importance of productivity, a case study will be performed using a typical product. In this case, a communication modem will be analyzed with respect to its productivity during assembly.
The recent development of real-time cost-estimating software such as SPACE TM has enabled a simple calculation of the effects of productivity on profit. 1 To demonstrate this effect, consider a modem assembled with the parameters...
