Automate Intelligence: Jumpstart Operational Agility in Product Development

Introduction

The need for enterprises to maintain operational agility became abundantly clear during the pandemic — the automotive sector is a case in point. Amid ongoing chip shortages and supply chain disruptions, manufacturers will find it helpful to automate intelligence across their product development and functional testing workflows to maintain or accelerate time-to-market and meet customer demand. Vehicles now have analytical tools that enable embedded intelligence, device connectivity, and autonomous capabilities. Each additional feature requires functional testing to ensure components and technology work as promised. As vehicles incorporate more technology, test cycles become increasingly complex and can cause significant delays.

With Keysight’s automate intelligence model, automotive manufacturers receive insights in real-time to connect design, test, and validation teams to a single source of project metrics. These metrics enable real-time, actionable insights so teams can quickly diagnose problems, offer decisive corrective actions, keep production lines running at optimal speeds, and meet customer demand. Further, manufacturing health monitoring tools can help maintain high FPY and keep production on track. In short, this type of operationalized agility has the potential to transform business.

This case study examines how a global manufacturer of high-performance automotive components reduced the time, cost, and risk associated with its product development work using Keysight’s software solution.

Organization

•  A global automotive component manufacturer

Challenges

• Low first-pass yield (FPY)

• Lengthy root cause analysis (RCA) times

Solution

• PathWave Manufacturing Analytics (PMA)

Results

• Reduced RCA process from six months to  five minutes

• Improved FPY

• Daily monitoring of fixture health

Challenge

The manufacturer of automotive components spent nearly six months trying to manually perform RCA on an equipment issue on its assembly line with limited success. During that time, the manufacturer temporarily shut down the production line and moved to a monthly maintenance program to address the loss in FPY. If the company continued to rely on manual data aggregation to deal with the issue, it would risk experiencing similar disruptions that could negatively impact its business.

Connecting the manually aggregated data was highly time intensive. In addition, identifying the root cause of the functional test failure was a steep challenge due to the large data sets associated with each component.

Solution

The manufacturer decided it could develop the operational agility needed to speed up RCA and boost FPY by adopting Keysight's PathWave Manufacturing Analytics (PMA) solution. PMA is designed to shift manufacturers to Industry 4.0 standards by analyzing big data to uncover actionable insights; PMA is well-suited to address challenges like FPY. For example, manufacturers can view performance across multiple variables, including retest, volume, and operating efficiency. PMA also supports manufacturers with features that can predict quality issues, diagnose operations with a no-code approach, and prescribe real-time adaptive test limits.

In this case, the automotive components manufacturer loaded data from the time period in question for offline analysis into PMA. Notably, this was the same data set that took the team six months of manual sorting to identify the problem.