Abstract
Solar cell manufacturing technology is similar to semiconductor technology, however, its level of automation in production is not as high as semiconductor technology due to its shorter processing time and lower material cost. Operations, identification, and transportation in the production process of solar cells traditionally depend on manual labors. On account of negligence from labors, it is considerably easy to lead failures or defects which cause abnormal occurrences in the factory and further influence on company reputation. This study took a solar cell manufacturer in Taiwan as an example. It introduced error proofing methodologies and processes to figure out the workstation which was the most frequent to label incorrectly on products. It employed cause-and-effect diagrams to identify the main cause of wrong labeling, “Product labels are not attached surly on products.” Furthermore, it evaluated various identification systems and considered pros and cons of each system according to the relationship between operations and cost. It applied a self-developed RFID system to replace the traditional barcode system in the end. During the development of the RFID system, it was based on the relationship between periods of error occurrence and effectiveness of error proofing functions to verify performance and reliability of this system. Owing to the introduction of RFID system in the case company, failures or defects in the operations have been significantly improved by automatic reading and writing. This system reduces the dependence on manual labors in production and avoids the inaccuracy and unreliability caused by the damage of configuration labels. It also has effectively decreased operation time and material cost