Harness Electrical Test

Quality Management and Statistical Analysis

Bill Quinn

12 August 2010
Intro

Often times one of the hardest things to do at a production facility is to determine

where to spend the limited amount of P&E budget that they have. At my facility this is a

constant battle as we have numerous areas to cover with aging equipment and very little

money to spend. Therefore, in order to get funding one must make a very thorough and

convincing argument as to where the money will best be spent. One of these areas is the

Electrical Test cell for Electrical Harnesses in our component repair area.

Importance of the Project

The Electrical Test cell has been an area of neglect for many years within our

shop and is drastic need of some change. The current process for testing electrical

harnesses is extremely slow and cumbersome and is a constant bottleneck in the engine

overhaul process. In order to improve the process we must consider investing money into

either a new electrical test machine or multiple new repairs.

Procedure

In order to get the data that I needed I first spoke with the people in the Electrical

Test cell and surveyed them in regards to the amount of time it takes them to process

parts through the area and what kind of scrap rates they were seeing. The reason that I did

this was so that I could you validate the actual data once I had pulled it. The first set of

data that I needed was our vouchered (charged) labor data for the testing of each cable

that came through the shop. I pulled this data by going to our SFE system and performing

a data dump of all of the labor times for that specific area of the shop within the last 12

months. From there I went to our scrap data base and pulled all of the scrap data for
cables within the same timeframe in order to find out the qty of scrap and the reasons

why.

Description of the Data

The chart below shows the qty of Harnesses that we have scrapped for each

particular scrap cause and the percent of scrap that each of those causes represent. As you

can see the two leading causes for scrap are due to the harness being chafed or having its

resistance out of limits. This data allowed me to narrow my focus upon the vital few Xs

when trying to figure out which repair or process changes would yield the best results.

The variables here are scrap cause and scrap qty.

Pareto Chart for reject

100
50

80
40

Percent
60
Count

30

20 40

10 20

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d/ rota Ot h
af e si s qu it ed Br
o Ho
Ch Re Re rcu ug
Ci G o
Count 12 11 5 5 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 2
Percent 22 20 9 9 7 6 6 4 4 2 2 2 2 2 4
Cum % 22 43 52 61 69 74 80 83 87 89 91 93 94 96 100

The next chart is a copy of a pivot chart that was created using the vouchered

labor data. It shows the total labor hrs, the qty of each harness that routed through test

and the average labor hours per harness. From there I calculated the average labor per
cable for each shop visit for both our CFM56-7 and –5 engines. The variables in this data

are repair rate and labor hours.

Part Name Labor Hrs Qty Avg Hrs

CJ10 Harness 22.6 7 3.23
CJ11L Harness 8.2 10 0.82
CJ11R Harness 10.2 8 1.28
CJ12L Harness 16.5 10 1.65
CJ12R Harness 20.2 9 2.24
CJ13 Harness 111.9 34 3.29
CJ9 Harness 181.1 38 4.77
ECU Harness Chan A 21.2 6 3.53
ECU Harness Chan B 4.9 1 4.90
Fan Gen Wire Harness 7.3 16 0.46
J10 Harness 180.5 39 4.63
J11 Harness 20.8 3 6.93
J12 Harness 1.4 1 1.40
J13 Harness 3.3 2 1.65
J5 Harness 47.5 6 7.92
J6 Harness 11.7 2 5.85
J7 Harness 16.2 5 3.24
J8 Harness 19.1 6 3.18
J9 Harness 85 22 3.86
Nacelle Harnesses 163.4 56 2.92
Grand Total 953 281 3.39

-7 Count -7 Hours Avg

177 713.3 4.03

-5 Count -5 Hours Avg

91 239.7 2.63

The results of both of these sets of data helped me determine that the scrap cost

per shop visit was $1,400 for Chaffing and $1,275 for Resistance out of limits. The

average labor cost per SV equates to roughly $630. The introduction of a new testing rig

would take the labor cost per SV down to $90 for a potential savings of $540 per SV. In

order to determine the value of new repairs we estimated that we would be able to cut our

scrap rates by 40%. This would result in a savings of $560 for Chaffing and $510 for

Resistance out of limits for a total of $1,070 per shop visit.

Results

At first glance the data would lead you to believe that new repairs would be the

most beneficial use of our money, yet after pulling several harnesses from our scrap hold

area we determined that nearly 75% of the harnesses that had scrapped for resistance out

of limits had scrapped due to the incorrect use of our current harness testing machine.

The problem largely lends itself to the age of the machine and its relative lack of

sophistication. With this data in mind we discussed the test faults that we were finding

with the vendor of our potential testing rig and discovered that the accuracy of the new

machine would completely eliminate scrap causes that were a result of our old machine.

This changed the savings associated to the new testing machine to $1496 per shop visit.

Conclusions

As a result of the data and the work with the shop floor it was determined that the

most beneficial use of our money would be to purchase a new testing rig and work has

begun to allocate the funding. Furthermore, as a result of the time savings and relative

TAT (turn around time) reduction associated with the use of the new tool we have begun

working with our sister shops to become their repair source for Electrical Harnesses. The

value of which equates to roughly $300,000 a year.

This project just goes to show how data and process analysis can bring many

unseen problems and potential fixes to light.