Boeing's Printed Circuit Board Center

Boeing's Printed Circuit Board Center builds about 40,000 printed circuit boards per year for Boeing's commercial, space and defense programs. They deal with a very large product mix and very small lot sizes, continually changing set-ups.

About three years ago a manager at this small captive shop owned by Boeing realized changes had to be made, yet faced the challenge of doing so without the shop really having control of its own infrastructure.

As a captive shop, some of the limitations they face include:

• No cost policy control
• Limited product control
• Limited schedule control
• Limited human-resource control

The shop was suffering from:

• Unacceptable on-time delivery performance (60-65%)
• Unacceptable scrap rate (about 35%)
• Outdated process technologies, making it more and more difficult to do quick-turn work
• Lots of expediting ­ everything being worked on was "hot"

The shop's upside was:

• There existed the capacity to produce more if they could nail down process control and improve delivery performance
• They received approval to upgrade their process technologies
• The TOC Thinking Processes were identified as the methodology they would use to define their change.

Having decided to use the Thinking Processes to guide them through their improvements, management at Boeing's Printed Circuit Board Center then built their Current Reality Tree (CRT) and identified the core problem. Chronic Conflicts were understood; and then a Future Reality Tree (FRT) was created to serve as the roadmap for the improvements to take place. As a result, Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR) scheduling was introduced in the center.

After three years of working through their FRT:

• Scrap has been reduced from 35% to 3%
• Leadtime has been reduced 75%
• A 100%+ increase in Throughput has been realized
• There has been a significant improvement in on-time delivery of high-quality products.

They expect it to take a couple of more years to work through their FRT, at which time management at Boeing's Printed Circuit Board Center will create another FRT and continue with their process of on-going improvement.

This success story was presented by a representative of Boeing's Printed Circuit Board Center at the Jonah Upgrade Workshop in May 1998. The presentation is available on video (#JUK-6)..