The Repository @ St. Cloud State

Open Access Knowledge and Scholarship

Date of Award

8-2012

Culminating Project Type

Starred Paper

Degree Name

Engineering: M.E.M

Department

Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering

College

College of Science and Engineering

First Advisor

Ben Baliga

Second Advisor

Hiral Shah

Third Advisor

Balsy Kasi

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License.

Keywords and Subject Headings

Module, Manager, Project, RMA, Processes

Abstract

Return Material Authorization (RMA) processing is a time consuming and costly process for any company that sells a product. For Logic PD, the added cost is especially burdensome because a high percentage of the assemblies that are returned are found to have no defect after reprogramming. No trouble found (NTF) assemblies cost both Logic PD and the customer time and money. An investigation was done to determine if there is a product, initially called a Module Manager (ModMan) that could be developed to help customers determine if their failing product is truly defective or just needs to be reprogrammed. In addition, the process of programming custom software was investigated to see if it was desirable to move the programming of custom software to the customer's manufacturing process. This would allow more customers to purchase standard products, and would allow those with hardware customizations to more quickly approve changes. A comprehensive investigation of the current programming and RMA processes were completed by interviewing internal and external resources. Three site visits were completed with three Tier 1 customers. The purpose of the visits was to learn about how they currently program their boards in manufacturing and how they process failing assemblies. It was clear from each of the visits that the customers in question wished to program the products in their own manufacturing process. It was also clear that each of the customers had different capabilities in determining if failing boards were truly bad and needed to be returned for evaluation.

Comments/Acknowledgements

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my team members - Micah Somers, Brain Mullins, Mike Erickson and Josh Jaeger. This project could not have been completed without your hard work and dedication.

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