NWA Quality Analyst® – Northwest Analytical, Inc.

Overview

NWA Quality Analyst is an award winning, full function Statistical Process Control (SPC) software package that leads the market in ease of use, integration and effectiveness. Integrating NWA Quality Analyst with TestStand enables users to use SPC to monitor their production process and implement effective improvement programs.

Northwest Analytical specializes in statistical analysis and is dedicated to providing essential analytical tools to help engineers understand processes and improve quality. Their Quality Analyst software provides the statistical process control to monitor and report both time-based parametric and attribute (pass/fail) data from any ODBC-compliant database or from ASCII files.

Get Full Value from Your TestStand Data

With NWA Quality Analyst you can realize full value from the test data collected by the TestStand system. By combining the best aspects of test management and statistical analysis, it is now possible to "close the loop" on process data and deliver flexible factory management systems that maximize test coverage when processes are tracking out of control, and minimize test coverage when processes are under control. This approach maximizes manufacturing throughput and reduces the cost of test.

National Instruments TestStand test management software and Northwest Analytical Quality Analyst statistical analysis software bring this efficiency and convenience to your systems. Together, these programs integrate easily into your system to bring you the best of test management and statistical analysis software. This powerful combination closes the loop on process data and delivers a flexible factory management system that helps you increase yields, maximize test throughput, minimize manufacturing defects, and reduce your cost of test.

Automate Your Quality Reporting

By integrating test management systems with statistical analysis, you create test systems that work more efficiently and result in higher quality products. And these integrated systems are automated, which means that you do not have to wait on a technician to start applications. The tests will automatically run each time a new board is produced. They keep your manufacturing process in control by revealing early signs that a process is not working correctly.

NWA Quality Analyst makes TestStand an automated production quality test system. NWA Quality Analyst can directly read data produced by TestStand and can be configured to automatically produce the required control charts and process capability reports. In addition to SPC charting, you can generate exception reporting and record assignable cause/corrective action data.

These integrated systems save you money. Catching errors before they ruin entire batches of products reduces scrap and increases productivity of your manufacturing process. Statistical analysis guides repair, reducing the time it takes to repair defects by pointing you to common causes for failures. Statistical analysis also frees you from having to take machines off line for periodical repair. Instead, you can take the machine off line only when the trends suggest that it needs repair.

NWA Quality Analyst reads both time-based parametric and attribute (pass/fail) data from any ODBC-compliant database or from ASCII files. This enables you to tightly integrate the test data collection with the process quality reporting and analysis.

Without the integration of a test system with built-in quality analysis, the production system has no direct feedback loop in place and is, in effect, "out of control". This condition is found in many organizations where all of the analysis takes place after the production of a batch of products. We can better understand the cost savings of integrating test and analysis by examining a fictional manufacturing line before and after the introduction of an integrated solution.

Case Study: Before NWA Quality Analyst

If we imagine that we are producing a batch of 100 communications subsystems for a military product, we may find the manufacturing line, the product, or components develop a fault while we are mid-batch. For example, the solder paste template may become misaligned, or incorrectly programmed FPGAs may be mixed into the production process. The net effect of these faults may be that 80 percent of the products fail in the batch. Because of no feedback loop being in place, this issue is not properly understood until the batch has completed the manufacturing process and the results subsequently analyzed.

The cost of such a problem is often highly understated. In this case, if we imagine that the value of the board is $3,000, made up of $2,500 of components and $500 for the manufacturing process, an 80 percent failure rate would constitute $240,000, plus lost revenue at an average 3X, which would bring the total to approximately $1 million.

Because this amount of scrap is intolerable, these boards would require repair. However, this repair process does in itself have a variable cost in terms of man-hours required, replacement components, and the loss of irreparable products. The time taken to repair each of these products will vary, but if we again assume that they will average four hours, or approximately $200 each, plus component costs of up to $500, we would have a repair cost of some $56,000, providing it is possible to repair all of the bad boards.

It is normally expected that a number of boards will be irreparable, because of damage in the production process or the repair process, or excess heat from unsoldering and resoldering components. If this number is even as high as five percent of the failed products, then we would see a total of four scrapped boards, which would total an additional $12,000. This amount brings the total cost of the bad production run to more than $65,000.

Case Study: After NWA Quality Analyst

By introducing the integrated test and analysis solution we add a near-instantaneous feedback loop and the process becomes "in control." With this feedback loop, the system can review the test data to look for any repetitive fault discovered in the testing process and calculate to see if it is statistically relevant. This relevancy acts as a filter to ensure that the manufacturing process doesn’t get shut down because of spurious data.

In our example, the linking of test and statistical analysis would show that two consecutive boards that both failed with identical problems would be a statistical anomaly and the system would raise an alarm on the manufacturing line. Because the alarm was raised as early as possible, the number of boards incorrectly manufactured would be at a minimum and hence the cost of the repairs, far lower.

For example, the problem items might be limited to the two boards that originally failed the tests, plus potentially up to 10 counting others that were in the actual manufacturing process. Following the calculations from above, the repair costs would be in the area of only $7,000, with potential savings over $58,000.

While this is a very simplistic example, it illustrates the very real costs associated with the repair of complex products that can be eradicated when intelligent systems are introduced to the process.

Conclusion

By integrating National Instruments TestStand and Northwest Analytical Quality Analyst, companies can react to problems on the production line much faster, reducing wasted materials and time spent on repairs. With test management and statistical analysis integrated into an automated system, organizations can target problem components and processes in less time and with more accuracy, reducing the cost of manufacturing quality products.

Learn More

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Northwest Analytical

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