Abstract
To solve energy crisis and environmental issues, people are actively looking for alternative energy sources, including Biomass Energy, Wind Energy, Geothermal Energy, Marine Energy and Solar Energy, to replace fossil fuels in recent years. Among them, Solar Energy is the most anticipated. Solar industry is highly growing, and it may become a competitive industry in Taiwan after Two Trillion and Twin Star industries. In solar cell industry, the automation of manufacturing process is becoming mature. Now all of the automation systems are still focused on the process of solar cell manufacturing, but the process of Packaging Quality Control (PQC), including packing, conveyance and inspection, are still operated manually. Therefore, these processes could cause problems such as low operating efficiency and Miss-Operation (MO). In this study, we examined the whole process of case study by Value Stream Mapping (VSM) and identified which activities were value-added (VA), non-value added (NVA) and necessary non-value added (NNVA) through controlling material flow and information flow. After constructing automation systems and continuing improving processes, we could eliminate what we define as waste. From the result, we found that constructing automation systems could not only effectively eliminate or reduce waste in the process but also reduce human cost and miss-operation. Ultimately, we could meet customer’s requirements, and reduce cycle time so that improve company’s competitiveness.