In flexible manufacturing, the need to evaluate various process design concepts that can survive and deliver better performance through many families and generations of products becomes more urgent. It is important to derive characteristics of the assembly station that are measurable and controllable. These characteristics should satisfy process and products needs.
In this paper, we report on the findings of a cross-functional team, representing Product Development and Manufacturing Engineering, that was assigned the design of the advanced assembly station required to load magnetic heads suspended by actuator arms in between a stack of media disks in the assembly of direct access storage devices (DASD) also known as hard disk drives (HDD). The core of our work was based on a Quality Function Deployment (QFD) approach that included the construction of a house of quality (John Hauser and Don Clausing, 'The house of quality' Technical Report, Operations Department, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA 02163; Bob King, 'Better Designs in Half the Time, Implementing Quality Function Deployment in America, 3rd edn, Goal/QPC Publishing, MA, 1989) which treated this process step as a system. We present results of the team efforts and describe the progressive stages that took place from the gathering of the station customers' wants and needs to the selection of a station design.