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CASE STUDY

Ensuring Traceability Accuracy

By: Cogiscan
Challenge
Providing traceability to Jabil’s customers is key to the service they provide, and scanner reading rates impact the accuracy of the traceability information acquired from the company’s production lines. The company was achieving a 75-85% reading rate of its serialized PCBs on the conveyorized assembly lines. Jabil knew that its traceability solution was only as good as the integrity of data captured by its scanners, and therefore decided to seek a more reliable and efficient solution.

Overview

Jabil is a global leader in the Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) industry, providing comprehensive and innovative electronic design, production and product management services to world-leading electronics and technology companies. Over the past 10 years, Jabil has boosted earnings and returns to shareholders mainly because of its ability to react quickly to the ever-changing demands of customers and by achieving customer satisfaction through excellence in manufacturing solutions. Jabil wanted to meet the traceability requirements of a top customer. “We wanted a solution that would be extremely reliable and that could be easily integrated with our internal traceability system, without having to invest in a completely separate software package or MES system,” recounts Ram Dornala from Jabil. “Cogiscan offered us the right product while showing a great deal of flexibility.”

Solution

Jabil has engaged Cogiscan Product Flow Controllers to ensure that scanners mounted at strategic scan points on the SMT line record all the product information required to populate its traceability database. The inclusion of Cogiscan Product Flow Controllers in Jabil’s traceability system makes it a more powerful tool: “Cogiscan’s solution ensures a 100% reading rate of serialized PCBs, allowing us to provide accurate information within 24 hours to our customers,” affirms Ram. “The Product Flow Controller prevents the PCB from transferring to the next operation, by controlling the SMEMA handshake between the conveyor and the machine, unless the serial number has been captured correctly. We are also using the PFC to prevent assembly defects, by having it prevent a PCB from moving forward whenever our MES detects something is wrong with the product or downstream process. This additional benefit is having an immediate and direct impact on the quality of our finished products. This was possible due to Cogiscan’s open architecture and willingness to integrate with our software.”

Benefits

Optimize reading rate to 100%

Before and after each machine, a scanner reads the serialized PCB number to record the product history. Before implementing the Cogiscan Product Flow Controller, the scanner reading rate was between 75-85%. Jabil wanted to eliminate the time wasted to perform this operation while ensuring that its traceability information was 100% accurate. “Before we adopted the Cogiscan solution,” explains Ram, “each time our customers requested traceability information, several employees were needed to collect the required information to avoid costly recalls. Now, our traceability system is error-proof because Cogiscan Product Flow Controllers ensure a 100% reading rate of each serialized PCB assembled for our customer. This is a great improvement. One of the most visible early benefits is that every time the customer asks for traceability information, we retrieve it much faster and there is nothing missing from the database.”

Dynamic support

As one of the top EMS providers in the world, Jabil requires optimal system performance. “On top of delivering reliable products, the Cogiscan team provides great support. They have expertise which gives us real peace of mind. Just like Jabil, these guys bend over backwards to make sure they meet customer commitments,” adds Ram.

Conclusion

“The Cogiscan Product Flow Controller is extremely reliable and it ensures data integrity. Our customer is very happy with our improved traceability capabilities, which reduce cost by enabling accurate and cost-effective recalls,” says Ram. It thus comes as no surprise that, over time, Jabil decided to begin integrating it in various manufacturing plants around the world.