Abstract
The purpose of the research is to provide an example to analyze process performance for printed cricuit board assembly lines of notebook computer plants. Data is collected from 3 major manufacturers in Taiwan by questionnaire and interviews. The cumulative production volume of these manufacturers is about 51﹪of Taiwan’s total notebook production in 1999, which, in turn, is about 25﹪of the world production. Our contributions include: 1) refining a manufacturing management model for PCBA line; 2) benchmarking performance indices in PCBA line; 3) inefficiency analysis for the three companies; 4) providing improving suggestions; 5) using simulation method to simulate and evaluate the benefits after the process improvement.The proposed generic improvements include reducing the number of process segments, reducing the amount of inter segment transportation, reducing inter segment transportation time, using continuous and U-shaped layout in PCBA line, reducing C.T. of the bottleneck workstation, increasing the line balance rate of the production line, automating Load/Unload in ATE station, increasing the rate of AOI in cosmetic inspection, increasing the rate of automatic ID station etc.Simulation indices that substential improvements can be gained if the recommendation are adopted.