We’ve covered First Pass Yield in depth before. But we realize you might just need to check in and quickly refresh your memory on what FPY is, how to calculate it, and why it’s so important in electronics manufacturing. So here it is, your quick guide to First Pass Yield.
First Pass Yield really isn’t that complicated, but many businesses, particularly those with in-house testing solutions, fail to calculate it properly. As we’ll get into today, this can be very costly to electronics manufacturers because issues in testing can quickly snowball if missed.
What Is First Pass Yield?
First Pass Yield (FPY) is a term you’ve probably heard at some point in the electronics industry, but maybe under a name like Throughput Yield or Output Yield. These terms confuse the real definition, so from now on – call it First Pass Yield. It refers to how many units of a product are tested successfully in a test process, compared with how many products went through that process. And importantly how many went through the first time!
The last part of that definition is very important and usually, the thing that manufacturers miss when they calculate FPY themselves. FPY needs to take into account every test failure that occurs, including retests on a unit that is made good following a failure. Also, the FPY value should be unique to each individual testing operation that you are carrying out on a manufactured product.
Why First Pass Yield Is So Important
FPY is a great way of determining wastage in your manufacturing process. That’s wastage stemming from failed production which impacts profitability and productivity with extra materials, machine time, and operator resources needed to hit your targets.
But there are a host of other benefits to testing FPY properly, including:
- Transparency across your supply chain
- Accountability for different groups that produce your goods
- Product Quality
Very often, manufacturers use product-centric KPIs to monitor how well production is going. But these types of metrics often occur very late in the production flow. Often the product itself can be flawless, but the weakness is in the test system itself. Perhaps the test interface board has a loose connection that the operator solves by wiggling the cables a few times. This type of anomaly won’t show up if you don’t register all the failures that true First Pass Yield does.
The Best Way To Track First Pass Yield
To get the full potential value of your testing environments, you need a solution that has a sufficiently wide scope to capture all test failures and inefficiencies and to see where they actually come from.
WATS helps electronics manufacturers manage test data. It was developed to solve a number of electronics testing challenges – including accurately calculating true First Pass Yield.
The architecture centralizes manufacturing data and promotes supply chain transparency to benefit both you and your supplier. WATS delivers full insight into the underlying data so that you can properly understand test and repair failures. This reduces warranty expenses, internal scrap, and labor costs.
Want to make your testing as good as it can be?
You need WATS. Get in touch today.
