As our daily activities become increasingly digitized, the global demand for microchips and electronic components will continue to skyrocket. As this need grows, there is also a greater need for assessment capabilities to avoid tragic malfunctions and debilitating product-wide recalls.
Consider the automotive industry where lives are at stake should a vehicle include a faulty chip. Automakers are bound to strict technical standards such as ISO 26262, which requires them to use state-of-the-art technology and to identify potential systemic and hardware defects during the manufacturing process.
But the industry is not up to date; it’s not adopting state-of-the-art technology when it comes to chip quality and reliability.
As our cars become increasingly digital, industry leaders simply cannot afford to be complacent with insufficient traceability. With a rapid increase in their reliance on automated processes and digitally advanced chips, automobiles today host complex electronic functions from sensors and cameras. As the technological focus of the industry changes, traceability must improve to meet the needs of an industry far different from the one it was even a decade ago.
To safeguard manufacturing, improve output efficiency and quality, and ultimately strengthen their bottom lines, OEMs must therefore elevate their standards beyond level 4 traceability and strive for complete exploratory traceability.
Traceability Today
IATF 16949:2016, the international standard for automotive quality management systems, attempts to ensure the quality of automotive manufacturing. But the production needs of modern vehicles have evolved far more rapidly than the regulations created to monitor them.
For decades, the automotive industry concentrated on optimizing product assembly over-assessing component quality. Currently, there are no widely used tools that provide 100% inspection of electronic components during manufacturing.
While manufacturers do maintain tight supervision on quality control in the assembly process, assessing the authenticity and quality of individual components to prevent the integration of defective electronic components or those damaged by oxidized or corroded leads remains inadequate. Currently, the highest manufacturing standard still fails to examine products on the component level.
In addition, the traceability resolution commonly in use is essentially just a glorified version of batch traceability.
The Automotive Component Crisis
Considering today’s limited traceability capabilities, any shift in the supply chain has the potential for serious implications for both automakers and drivers. Not only does this significantly increase the chances of automakers purchasing counterfeit or poor-quality chips,
but OEMs have no real-time feedback about the quality of any given supplier’s product.
The consequences can be acute. In 2021, for example, Mercedes-Benz seized more than
1.86 million counterfeit parts globally —a 6% increase compared to the year prior.
What Better Traceability Means for Automakers
With advancements in standards and regulations, a new solution has emerged that offers
comprehensive visual inspection of every single electronic component. This groundbreaking approach is called “exploratory traceability,” and it allows OEMs to identify and address potential issues at the individual component level.
Unlike traditional batch traceability methods, exploratory traceability provides smart insights, enabling precise recalls of faulty component chips on reels. This targeted approach minimizes waste by avoiding the need to discard large quantities of products due to a batch-level issue.
Providing OEMs with 100% accurate traceability has a host of benefits. Not only does exploratory traceability minimize disruptions within the manufacturing process, but it reduces waste, redundancy, and scrap rates, all of which ensure higher yields and better bottom lines.
Exploratory traceability also mitigates the impact of recalls. While automotive recalls are rare and reserved for the most extreme cases, they can be incredibly costly, both in reputation and financially. Without accurate traceability data on the source of problematic chips, auto manufacturers may be forced to recall an entire fleet of vehicles even some without any actual defects, for safety’s sake as they are unable to trace back to a specific issue and understand exactly which vehicles might be affected.
Shifting Gears in the Industry
Most chip failures are accompanied by visual indications on the exterior of the chip itself. Therefore, the ability to observe and inspect 100% of chips used in any given product is the most effective and comprehensive means of identifying and mitigating nearly all potential issues.
By implementing robust visual inspection processes such as exploratory traceability, OEMs and automakers can significantly improve product reliability and productivity with surgical precision, reduce the risk of quality issues, and better protect their customers and their bottom lines.
The article was originally published on iconnect007 MAGAZINE