Design for Manufacturing and the Acceptance of Six Sigma
Welcome back to WISDOM WEDNESDAY! In this post we’ll start with the decades that witnessed the blending of Six Sigma together with Lean Manufacturing and then move forward in time to the current century and the integration of Design for Manufacturing with that Lean Six Sigma combination. Wisdom Wednesday is brought to you by Micron Corporation that manufactures precision electronics at a Micron level.
From the Last Century to this One
Motorola introduced Six Sigma in the 1980s. By the 1990s it began to gain acceptance with many other companies and was being combined with Lean Manufacturing. By the late 1990s it has been estimated that some two-thirds of Fortune 500 (not unlike today’s S&P 500) companies had adopted Six Sigma tools and methods, often alongside Lean Manufacturing principles. Within those same two decades, Design for Manufacture (DFM) was being implemented in process-intensive industries.
DFM was particularly useful in the design and manufacture of integrated circuits (ICs) and printed circuit boards (PCBs) and the assemblies produced using them (PCBAs). Yet the usefulness of the design for manufacturability was in view long before the 20th century. Neanderthals built tools; but let’s not go that far back in time for this description. In the First Industrial Revolution (c.1760 – 1840) systems using interchangeable parts came into focus thanks to people such as Eli Whitney who invented the cotton gin in 1793. The Second Industrial Revolution (c.1870-1914) saw the rise of assembly line production thanks in significant part to Frederick Winslow Taylor backed by Henry Ford.
DFM evolved alongside Design for Assembly (DFA) in the 1960s and 1980s. The difference was that DFM focused more on the PCB itself, and DFA on the PCBAs. In the 1960s and 1970s much academic research, notably by Geoffrey Boothroyd at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, focused on automated assembly and part-count reduction to cut labor and cost. DFM and DFA were combined and became Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA). These days, the acronym DFM is often used to refer to both DFA and DFMA. Such was the structural evolution of DFM, that, once coupled with Six Sigma, gained acceptance across many industries in the 21st century.
Moving back in time for just a moment. Another part of the Six Sigma toolkit, as originally developed by Motorola in the 1980s, was a four-phase method of Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control (MAIC). It was a modernized implementation of Plan-Do-Check-Act as Walter Shewhart had proposed. It soon transformed into DMAIC, which added the “D” for Define. DMAIC has been highly noted as popularized by Jack Welch, a former CEO of General Motors, that had adopted it as part of Six Sigma in the 1990s.
In the 21st century, Lean Six Sigma, Design for Manufacturing, and DMAIC form a combination of principles, tools and methods that are nearly indispensable to modern manufacturers around the globe. They have been implemented, refined, improved, replaced, and added to by many persons across many countries and shared in one way or another. The accomplishments from these shared efforts are nothing if not incredible (though, perhaps, not always wonderful). 250 years ago who would have even considered the ablity to speak to another person halfway around the world at a moment’s notice. The tethers that connect us have been both minimized and maximized.
Towards ASML
All of the acronyms we have mentioned throughout this post relate to the ongoing transformation of manufacturing practices. Electronics manufacturing, in particular, is still very much in the flux that continues to bring us new ICs, PCBs, and PCBAs. The literal dimensions that have become necessary for these achievements in electronics are miniscule. Mils (one thousand of an inch) are often used for measuring stencil dimensions, millimeters (one thousand of a meter) are most commonly used for individual electronic components, and microns (one millionth of a meter) are often used for more precise PCB and IC dimensions. And none of these dimensions even comes close to the nanometer scale (one billionth of a meter) produced by Extreme UltraViolet lithography employed by ASML (ASML Holding N.V.) headquartered in the Netherlands.
In Closing
That brings us to the end of this latest post of Wisdom Wednesday. We look forward to sharing with you again next week. And you can always share information with us at MICRON CORPORATION by contacting info@microncorp.com.