Assembly Quality Methodolgy: An Application of the Defect Prediction to Audio Equipment Assembled at Various Manufacturing Sites

This paper describes the development of the quantitative predictor of defects that works not only on the whole product but also on its modular units. The authors divide the assembly process of a product into small modules, and apply the Assembly Quality Methodology (AQM) to determine the assembly complexity of the modules. The authors also verify the correlation between complexity factor of the modules and their defect rates. The newly proposed floating threshold assembly time improves the correlation between complexity factor and defects per unit (DPU). The authors discuss the comparison of case studies and the interpretation of their results for the future improvement of the method.