Trans-Tech is both a smart and a lucky manufacturing firm. Based in Maryland with some 300 employees at two facilities, the company had a lot to lose when a bottleneck prevented rapid delivery of an increased order from a steady customer, the U.S. Navy. Most customers, in
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"Our factory is no different than any other," says Stein. "There is always process variation and there is always an issue of lack of control because there are so many variables that can impact a result."
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such straits, might take their business elsewhere, but luckily this client started nearly "living with us," says Quality Assurance Manager Seth Stein, because they needed the product and they needed it now.
The smart Trans-Tech solution: A one-week Design of Experiments training for all their engineers, taught by DOE expert and Tunnell Consulting Principal Larry Meyers. DOE is the advanced mathematical tool that enables quick resolution of major process and product problems by allowing multiple variables to be analyzed simultaneously.
"Our factory is no different than any other," says Stein. "There is always process variation and there is always an issue of lack of control because there are so many variables that can impact a result."
Trans-Tech produces technical ceramics for wireless communications-essentially mixing, forming and firing powders into many different shapes and sizes that are then inserted into a customer's larger assembly. In the Navy situation, Trans-Tech was creating a dielectric insert and encountered capacity and yield problems when the size of an order suddenly swelled.
"We knew we had to explode the capacity of the tumbling operation, but at the same time, not sacrifice yields," explains Stein. "Based on Larry's training, one of my engineers put together an 11-variable design that produced such phenomenal results and was so easy, it was almost too good to be true. We even called Larry to make sure we had done it right."
Stein says that changes revealed by the experiment resulted in an immediate leap in unit per hour capacity from 150 to 362 units, with yields jumping from 60 to 97%. Added bonuses, he notes, were a 42% decrease in process time and a 35% reduction in material use.
Stein concludes, "DOE enabled us to create the best of all possible worlds here -- doing things quicker with less money and better yields."
And was the client happy? "They've become a silent and obviously satisfied customer," says Stein. "We've never had a problem again."
For Trans-Tech this success was only one of a number of ongoing breakthroughs made possible by DOE. Seth Stein is especially proud of the release of a proprietary compound that was bogged down in failure for years; within months DOE supplied the correct formula to bring the product to market.
"The greatest lasting impact of our DOE training," says Stein, "is that the company now operates with a data-driven philosophy. I think that the greatest downfall of American companies is that they try to make decisions with little or no data. Larry showed us that statistics in general and DOE in particular demand that you have enough data before you move forward." And for those still on the fence about this sophisticated tool, Stein -- not an engineer himself -- says he has found DOE surprisingly easy to use: "It's not like school where you have to memorize anything. Once you go through the training and get your basic statistical knowledge, it's just a question of plugging in the numbers, it's all common sense stuff."
It certainly made common sense to Trans-Tech, now working to become a world-class
manufacturer.
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