About the client
Industry: Consumer electronics
Product: Wearable
Customer Size: Hardware startup
Country: United States
Challenges
- There was an over-spec gap issue between the product’s cover housing and band;
- The cover flexing up due to the deflection of the clips when fully assembled, which was unseen with the first 12,500 units;
- The TPE (thermoplastic elastomers) thickness was also over-spec;
- Inefficient communication among the plastic injection and tooling suppliers, the contract manufacturer and the client;
- Client’s mechanical engineer failed to do rigorous part test because of the difficulty of measuring the part’s specifications.
How we helped
- Our mechanical supplier quality engineer was assigned to review the product specification, cover and band assembly structure and process;
- Collected drawings and analytical data from client’s mechanical engineer to understand previous experiment details;
- Review the gap issue and identified possible root causes with client’s mechanical engineer;
- Visited the plastic injection supplier onsite to understand the manufacturing processes and quality control details;
- Defined corrective actions after root cause analysis;
- Reviewed design for manufacturing (DFM) with the injection and tooling suppliers’ engineering teams;
- Suggested plastic injection and tooling suppliers to do a tooling modification and dimension measurements to verify if new samples meet the requirements after assembly;
- Reviewed all the samples with plastic injection suppliers with the help of proper measurement criteria and methodology;
- Used 30 samples for the magnet force test and pull test after full assembly of the product;
- Guided the suppliers to set up a measurement analysis system to follow strictly.
Results
- Increased the yield rate from 92.65% to 99.485;
- Resolved the gap issue;
- No more complaints from the client.
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