Original Date: 10/10/2005
Revision Date: / /

Raytheon’s Integrated Air Defense Center at Andover created a novel system using WaveTrack software that offers complete circuit card assembly component traceability.

Raytheon’s Andover Integrated Air Defense Center (IADC) produces high reliability circuit card assemblies (CCAs) for a diversity of programs, many of which require complete component traceability for each CCA. To implement a traceability program, Andover combined processes from its other facilities and reviewed software used by other manufacturers. WaveTrack, an existing Off-the-Shelf software system that is heavily modified for pick-and-place machines on the Surface Mount Technology (SMT) line, was chosen to meet the facility’s process requirements and achieve full integration with other existing software systems used on the manufacturing lines.

To modify its CCA traceability process, Raytheon synthesized detailed design and testing requirements. Formal unit and integration testing and null testing were performed. Processes were analyzed to detect process flaws and inefficiencies through extensive use of modeling and simulation. WaveTrack sends all traceability information such as cage code and lot code to the Shop Floor Data Manager (SFDM) and automatically processes the information of all components to be assembled on the CCA.

One of the benefits of this new system is the elimination of all operator data entry errors that are the result of manually recording component traceability of a specific CCA. This product has been in use as a pilot program on 20 boards for the STANDARD Missile-3 (SM-3) program since the summer of 2005. While this system is very new, it shows outstanding potential for reducing error rates by detecting errors before a manufacturing process begins on a CCA. If an error is encountered that can affect traceability, WaveTrack software generates an e-mail alerting the supervisor on the floor that a problem has occurred and explains what went wrong, where it occurred and when it occurred. WaveTrack software also allows flexibility for manually correcting CCA data elements.

Raytheon is aggressively planning for the future by retrieving component traceability information from bar coded product improvement developments (PIDs) on the component reels and will be able to offer a complete electronic record of the CCA to be readily available to the customer through the SFDM.

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