One of the biggest concerns a customer faces when deciding whether or not to outsource is losing the ability to monitor what is happening on the manufacturing lines and respond in real-time with decisions and changes.    Fabrinet recognizes that this sense of control – along with real-time information - is critical to a manufacturer’s ability to manage a shop floor.  Fabrinet addressed this issue by remotely providing   all the visibility a customer would have if they were inside the factory themselves – only better.

Fabrinet has implemented an advanced shop floor control and monitoring system to support this “just next door” feeling.  Integration with Fabrinet’s Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP,) Incoming Quality Inspection database and other data sources – even data from manufacturing equipment – creates an information framework that provides an extraordinary level of shop floor visibility and real-time control over virtually every manufacturing process.  Live views of production status and historical records of manufactured units combine to form a suite of monitoring and traceability information.

This information is available to customers 24/7 and in real-time via a secure web portal that accesses Fabrinet’s state-of-the-art manufacturing and product traceability system, called the Fabrinet Information Tracking System (FITS).

“Occasionally a customer will ping a Fabrinet manager with a question or a concern before the manager even arrives to work, because the customer has round-the-clock access to information occurring in a 24-hour assembly line,”  said Dr. Harpal Gill, Fabrinet’s COO.   “This visibility and transparency of information is greatly reassuring to our customers.  It enables us to work more quickly and effectively in tandem with our customers to achieve the desired response.”

Within the FITS standard framework, customers can tailor their own Customer Zone web portal to their needs, accessing data from a variety of sources including the shop floor systems and inventory and planning systems.  A variety of predefined reports show real-time work in process, yields, and Statistical Process Control (SPC) data while custom data sets can be configured for reports providing visibility of virtually any manufacturing related information.

The systems offer product and component traceability down to the supplier, lot number, and delivery date of each component.  Components can be traced through every step of the build process, including which employee worked with which components in every step.  This data enables Fabrinet and our customers to quickly identify the root cause and corrective actions during failure analysis to improve the overall reliability.

“Our customers tell us that this is the best system they’ve seen,” said Dr. Gill.

“My team and I work closely with our engineering staff and sometimes work directly with customers for the initial project transfer phase in order to understand and provide the FITS solution that complies with our standard framework and best meets requirements,” said Dr. Panit Watcharawitch, who manages Fabrinet’s FITS development.

Fabrinet provides a menu of standard reports for qualifying customers, and has recently introduced additional, specialized reports offering a deeper or broader view into a particular area.  These reports include:

Product History:  Presents an easy to read, graphical view of a manufactured unit’s build history by serial number and ordered by its operational timeline.  Each process step is detailed together with each step’s final result.  The report allows the user to drill down into each operation to view components, sub-components, or the operation’s parametric data.

Work in Process:  Tracks the quantity and percentile of production units that have been recorded in the system at each operation.  With drill-down capability, it also allows users to trace each unit’s build history.

Yield Report:   Presents a yield chart containing information on the first prime run (first pass yield,) retests or re-runs, rework, and cumulative yields.  The chart is interactive with drill-down data tables that take the user into a pareto distribution of each failure group.

Pareto Report:  Contains two detailed charts that are used by engineers to analyze and identify main failure causes that affect yield.  Security features in this report allow for access control to authorized users only.

SPC Chart: An interactive tool that allows engineers to control the production process.  The tool provides real-time alerts when there is an unusual trend indicating a potential problem.  It is also used to assist engineers in taking the corrective actions.

“Statistical Process Control provided in part by the FITS system, is an integral part of Fabrinet operations,” said Dr. Gill.  “We initially built the FITS system in support of our own continual improvement directives, but quickly realized its value for customers.  In addition to peace of mind, the FITS system provides customers with significant planning and analytical capability as well as the protection of ongoing product traceability.”