During an assembly line review with a potential customer, the Field team noticed that a considerable amount of meter boxes were being scrapped and removed each day. Upon further review of the assembly process, the team observed that the workers were having problems with tapped thread quality and recess damage.
A slotted pan head machine screw was being driven into a tapped hole, resulting in improper seating during assembly. The Field team also observed cam out issues causing recess damage, driver bit damage, and screw stripping issues. All these issues were correlating to a significant amount of down time and a large quantity of scrapped materials
The Field team proposed an alternative solution by using a 6-lobe pan head thread forming fastener with a recommended hole size and seating torque to allow the elimination of tapping operations and rework. Field performed testing on the suggested solution and provided the company with the test results. The potential customer went on to partner with Field and implement the recommendations Field had discovered. This eliminated the excessive amount of scrap, manual rework time, down time, eliminated the need to tap the holes, and reduced driver bit consumption.
The customer’s engineering team verified the cost savings opportunity presented by the Field team, and signed off for the recommendations to be put in place. Because of the configuration of the customer’s existing tapping process the removal of tapping did not increase through-put which eliminated what would have been an additional $500,000 cost savings. By utilizing the Field team, a monumental cost reduction recommendation was seamlessly implemented:
Total Cost Savings: $218,369