Week of September 6th – The basics of manufacture

This week I learned how to build two of Doug Fleenor Design’s basic products; The 125 Opto-Isolated Splitter, and the Preset10. I learned the entire process, from creating a pick list and assembling the pieces, to finishing the product and testing them. DFD generally has an assembly house a few miles away do most of their large orders, but because the assembly house was so impacted with other orders, we had to build these products in house.

A lot of modifications, or custom orders are done in house as well.

The Process:

First you create a pick list using the inventory management system, BusinessWorks. This automatically deducts the parts needed for the product you’re going to build from the inventory, and will allow you to build the completed part in inventory after it is assembled, along with the serial numbers the finished product now has. Once the pick list is created, you must gather all of the necessary parts and begin assembly. This involved me going through bins and grabbing the right amount of circuit boards, chips, resistors, triax’s, LED’s, etc.

Assembly is in various stages, depending on the product being made. For example, the pc board assembly is typically done out of house, but because we needed these products quickly, we did it in house. The splitter has an assembly for the pc board, and then an upper level assembly which mounts the pc board onto the housing, and finishes the product. Before the pc board can be mounted, however, the bottom of the sheet metal must be laser engraved using DFD’s laser etcher.

Finally, the finished products must be tested by someone who was not in charge of building the products, and entered into the accounting/inventory system as finished products.

I slowly earned my reigns by starting with case assembly, soldering of connectors, soldering chips, to talking to customers over the phone.