Production Control/Scheduling

Trained and qualified staff, most with over 10 years of experience with SED, ensures a smooth flow of work through the manufacturing process. Material analysts plan the material requirements to secure stock availability. Incoming inspectors and material handlers qualify, maintain and transact parts while production controllers plan and guide the manufacturing schedule. Manufacturing data control coordinators control change implementation within the production cycle and maintain manufacturing records.

Material Management

Material requirements are planned using an MRP-II project requirements planning tool. Orders are placed for parts approved by the design authority with suppliers on SED's qualified vendors list. The timing of orders is coordinated with production schedules. Customer-supplied material is stored and accounted for in production, with unused goods returned in good condition. Experienced customs and traffic personnel are available to expedite cross-border incoming and outgoing shipments. SED stores area has controlled access and stable environmental conditions to ensure inventory is preserved in a production-ready state. We maintain complete forward and backward material traceability on all production materials. Control of consumable goods is managed through SED's tool crib to ensure no shelf-life-expired goods are used in production and to ensure sufficient production stock. We also have the capability to bar code customers' goods to meet specifications and symbology needs.

Production

The production department employs a pool of assembly and test staff to build and test electronic products and systems from initial production through acceptance testing. The majority of staff have more than 10 years of experience in the electronics industry. SED's manufacturing operation includes:

• A state-of-the-art, low- to medium-volume automated surface mount line that includes screen printing, automatic pick and place equipment, and solder re-flow capability.
• Full circuit card assembly capabilities in through-hole, multi-layer, surface mount, hybrid circuit cards, and RF and microwave cards.
• Full cable and wire harness manufacturing capabilities for complex, high-reliability applications including semi-rigid, coaxial, triaxial and heliax, flat ribbon, laced and cable tie harnesses, and power cables. Capabilities include design, manufacturing and test including continuity, insulation resistance, dielectric withstand, and insertion and return loss.

Test and Environmental Screening

SED has a multi-million dollar inventory of calibrated state-of-the-art test equipment for production testing, tuning and troubleshooting of analog, digital and RF electronic assemblies and systems. Equipment includes counters, meters and oscilloscopes; logic, LAN and protocol analyzers; bit error test sets; and spectrum and network analyzers. Our test infrastructure includes several HP VEE development platforms for fast implementation of sophisticated automated test. To perform environmental testing, we have in-house environmental stress screening facilities capable of temperature cycling, random and sine vibration, combined thermal/vibration and shock testing.

Customer Support

Timely response to situations that impair, or threaten to impair operations is critical for high availability systems. SED has developed an approach that addresses the key elements of successful operational support. Timely access to trained resources is essential for providing effective support. SED's warranty provisions often include a 24-hour per day emergency technical support hotline. Any time, day or night, customers are able to contact a trained support engineer who can immediately begin investigating any problem. A response from the SED on call personnel typically occurs in less than five minutes. SED also has the capabilities and infrastructure in place to provide quick-response repair of failed hardware. Faulty equipment is returned to SED along with a description of the failure. Turnaround time for the repair is typically less than 30 days.

Manufacturing Engineering

Staffed by personnel with formal technical training in electrical engineering, CAD/CAM, computer science, mechanical and industrial engineering, our manufacturing engineering (ME) group develops step-by-step processes for manufacturing that control all aspects of assembly operations. They review a product's as-designed structure to assess its suitability for manufacture and changes are initiated through a manufacturing change order with traceability back to the original design documents. Tooling and equipment needs are assessed and jigs and fixtures are designed and developed. When practical, pre-production runs are used to establish the manufacturing process and train the assembly team, with manufacturing engineering heavily involved to identify and solve process problems. Once in production, ME continues to monitor the process for process drift and isolated problems. Process improvement opportunities are identified to improve efficiency, quality and product cost. ME assures that these changes are properly implemented through redlines, ECRs or MCOs and that all documents are updated as required.