The characterization of a clean room assembly process

This paper presents the findings of a cross-functional team that was in charge of putting in place the design guidelines for the future assembly line of the small form factor hard disk drives (HDDs). Keeping in mind that the factors affecting the characterization of an assembly process depend greatly on the nature of the product, the market forecast for the product, the production geographical location, and many other local and special constraints, we however, believe that a similar approach to the one reported in this paper can yield an acceptable set of measurements that can help the product development teams present more manufacturable products. The core of our work was based on a quality function deployment approach that included the construction of a house of quality. In addition to the findings of the team, we describe the progressive stages that had to take place, from gathering the factory customers' wants and needs to organizing the cross-functional team. We started with internal customers' needs for the ideal HDD manufacturing process. Our internal customers represented manufacturing operators, process engineers, product developers, and managers for all three groups. With a large group of participants from dependent functions that included cleaning, testing, assembly, product technology, manufacturing engineering, and others, we derived the clean room assembly process characteristics that are measurable and controllable to address our internal customers' needs.