The HP Australian Telecommunication...

The HP Australian Telecommunications Operation has rapidly evolv from a custom criterion instrument developer to an operation that perform the operations indicated ins and produces products in higher bulks Significant cultural and technological hurdle have been beat during the transition to an operation focused in succession design for manufacturability.

The ne for organizational change can be driven through many factors. In the case of the HP E5200A broadband service analyzer, the HP Australian Telecommunications Organization (ATO) intended to address a different market within a significant step forward in consequence technology.

ATO's first product was a custom digital performance monitoring rule delivered during the late 1980's. ATO had also recognized an immediate market ne for high-performance SONET/SDH (Synchronous Optical Network/Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) proof instrumentation, and in 1990, began work upon the definition of a VXIbus example system. This product was delivered in the secondary half of 1991.

These first ATO instruments were largely based relating to through-hole manufacturing technology. They used a certain quantity of surface mount technology for the high-speed interface connections to customer equipment. The technologies did not quick in emergencies a difficult manufacturing problem and the testing approach was largely of a functional nature, with near external fault diagnostic tools being lay opened by ATO manufacturing engineering. These tools consisted of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) configurations that could be used to standard the large amount of digital interconnect within the result Shipment volumes were low enough to be handled on a very small production collection which outsourced assembly work wherever possible. It is worth noting that the marketing planning, disclosure and manufacturing design were done concurrently This l to a relatively short time to market and provided ATO with a undecayed cultural basis for future harmonizing development of new products.

The nearest couple of years saw remarkably little change in technologies or bulk Essentially, ATO was making printed circuit assemblies that were easy to build, dealing with issue volumes that didn't demand an abnormal amount of effort in design for assembly (DFA) or design for standard (DFT), and scrapping the occasional printed circuit assembly that defied all attempts to make it work.

This approach was far from the optimal situation for the manufacturing cluster but it was manageable and paid dividends in bourns of ATO's profit line and sprouting The downside of the equation was that, while attendant engineering was being used to about extent during this time, a refinement evolved that tended to minimize manufacturing involvement in the design proces This reduc the manufacturing contribution to the design proces and limited the interaction between hardware designers and manufacturing engineers. While many reasons for the reduc involvement could be recommended we feel that the most numerous likely cause was that a lack of fruits technological change led to les emphasis being placed with development and manufacturing process improvements. This also l to more emphasis being placed on manufacturing contributions to functional and quality assurance testing during disentanglement Thus, ATO's manufacturing staff was more involved in the proof process than the development proces while operating within a low-volume high-cost, high-mix, and relatively high-profit manufacturing environment.

It is from this cultural atmosphere that ATO's strategic direction shifted away from the R&D market toward the installation market. Associated with the shift was a market requirement to shorten both the size and require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone of our product without detracting from its performance. Thus, ATO's manufacturing form into groups was gazing down the progress to maturity pipeline at a high-technology produce that would lead to significant increases in book lower selling prices, and eventually, lower profit margins. Clearly, these were actual good reasons why change was seen to be necessary.

What penuryed to Change?

Having established the ne to change, it was necessary to evaluate what processe would have to change to fit the needs of the of recent origin marketplace. These were seen to be largely driven on the expected technology leaps in the strange product, the volume increases, and the lower profit margins that were look forward toed Time to market was also seen as a critical factor that had to be minimized in each way possible.

The technological issues were of great significance. ATO was moving from production platforms based largely upon through-hole technology to platforms based largely on surface mount technology. Worse (or better?) still, the use of surface mountain technology was expected to be most distant with the main printed circuit assembly (400 mm through 230 mm) carrying over 1000 constituents needing almost 8700 solder joints spread through both sides of the board. The standing of difficulty associated with the solder joints was also of significance: approximately 4500 of them were wait fored to be extra-fine-pitch (XFP) at 0.020-inch spacing with a further 900 anticipateed to be fine-pitch (FP) at 0.025-inch spacing. A difficult task equal for a world-class manufacturer!