The behavior of successful manufacturing companies has changed in response to the accelerating pace of technological development in recent years. Manufacturing firms are under greater pressure than ever to bring new products and processes to market rapidly, with lower costs and higher quality than achieved in the past. In addition, the establishment of a global economy no longer dominated solely by the United States has required firms to expand their outlooks and horizons. Successful firms must take a multinational view, understanding and serving local customer needs while maintaining the efficiency of a global enterprise. This requires greater flexibility in manufacturing and distributing new products.

As the business environment for materials manufacturing changes, so too does our measure of materials performance. Traditionally, materials scientists and engineers have emphasized processing, structure and properties, and the way they come together to produce performance of a product in a given application. However, as shown by Figure 1, there are several additional dimensions to performance. In particular, successful commercial performance depends not only on the physical properties of the material but also on our ability to shape it into a useful object in an economical and timely manner. Without shape, the product cannot serve its intended function, and without economical production, the product's usefulness is limited to fewer, higher value applications. Achieving more rapid and more consistent commercial success from advanced materials requires emphasizing not only the process by which the material is made but the process by which the material achieves its geometry and function, while at the same time maintaining the ability to bring these materials to market rapidly at an economical price. Indeed, the cost delay in commercializing a new material can be the key to success or failure.

The use of manmade materials progressed rather slowly until the science and technology of metals, refractories, and glass burst forth in the mid-1800s and continued its infancy through the first decades of the 20th century. In fact, much of the scientific wherewithal in industrial nations focused on the development of manmade materials from the standpoint of properties and fabrication processes. From the discipline of metal physics, which emerged in the 1930s, and from the scientific activities in ceramics, polymers, and electronic materials that blossomed in the 1940s and 1950s, a science and engineering base was established, enabling advanced materials and components to be fabricated, often for specific end-user applications. The molecular engineering of crystals, for example, has its roots in von Hippel's studies of dielectric materials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which began in the 1930s. In this time frame, society, which had primarily used such materials as wood, gypsum, clay, copper, zinc, lead, and iron, turned to a broader set of materials to meet new uses. These new applications required an understanding not only of the composition of matter, but of novel and difficult processes as well. Research specialties broadened.

From the late 1950s to the present, the knowledge base for materials and components has exploded. In this period, the scientific and technological field of endeavor—materials science and engineering (MS&E) — evolved from a collection of discrete, disparate arts and crafts with varied amounts of science and practitioners who generally did not stray from their own specialties to a more diffuse field where researchers take a broader approach to materials research and practice.

Electronic packaging involves using an appropriate combination of conductive and dielectric materials to electrically interconnect and mechanically support electronic components in a reliable and cost-effective manner. Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1959 and mass wave-soldering in 1958, the vast majority of electronic packaging has involved a planar substrate to which semiconductor devices in protective packages are attached by melting eutectic solder. The planar substrates or printed circuit boards (PCBs) were invented in 1940, but their widespread implementation was limited until the invention of mass soldering. PCBs use conventional epoxy-glass dielectric material with mass patterned conductive traces of copper, but alternative materials have been used for either enhanced electrical performance or lower product cost.

In the mid 1980s, reports of exciting progress from GaAs integrated circuit (IC) performance from R&D laboratories world-wide portrayed a rosy future for GaAs. Now, in the early 1990s, true to their reputation, GaAs ICs are still largely the stuff of the future. In fact, deployment of GaAs ICs in real systems has been disappointingly slow. In 1985, the commercial GaAs IC market was forecast to reach $800 million by 1990. The actual figure was only $142 million. To put this number in perspective, it represents less than 0.4% of the total Si IC merchant market.

In a recent survey of the GaAs industry, Kato explored the causes for GaAs troubles, with startling findings. The issue certainly does not seem to be a performance one because GaAs ICs are sufficiently ahead of alternative technologies. Material quality is not a problem either. Extremely high-quality 3 in. and 4 in. GaAs wafers are now on the market at reasonable prices. On the other hand, several serious deficiencies center around IC manufacturing. The price of the final GaAs ICs is perceived as not competitive with alternative technologies. This is rooted in the low yields and poor repeatability of the manufacturing lines. A great contribution to cost is time-consuming functionality testing, particularly for analog products. For MMICs (monolithic microwave integrated circuits) in particular, final testing can easily become the bottleneck of the entire fabrication process. There is also much uncertainty about reliability. This might explain to a large extent the low customer confidence in the technology. Kato reports that fundamental technical problems in making GaAs ICs are still believed to remain.

For efficient and economic production of discrete parts with any material, it is always desirable to obtain the final product using one process alone, without secondary operations. This is called “net-shape” manufacturing. Injection molding is perhaps the best net-shape manufacturing process for materials that can be handled by this method. For polymers and some of their composites, injection molding can mass produce high-precision parts with complex geometry at very low cost. In engineering applications, some injection-molded plastic parts of intricate shape with tight tolerance can be snap-fitted together for easy assembly, while others can achieve extremely high quality to meet the optical functional requirements for such parts as optical lenses and information-storage disks.

Since the oil crisis in the early 1970s, the use of polymers as an engineering material has been rapidly increasing to improve energy efficiency for both the processes themselves and the final products. Plastics still constitute one of the world's fastest growing industries. Polymeric materials and their composites offer various desirable properties including high strength-to-weight ratio, corrosion resistance, clarity, and others. Among all the polymer-processing methods, injection molding accounts for approximately one-third by weight of all the polymeric materials processed.

The terms “teamwork” and “statistical quality control” (SQC) have become an established part of U.S. manufacturing vocabulary, though not necessarily of manufacturing practice. Much has been written on these subjects, as even a cursory glance at the literature reveals (e.g., see References 1–11). This article will describe the organization and functioning of an SQC team at Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corporation. My observations are not necessarily novel, but I hope they provide some useful insights into team building, teamwork, and SQC in a U.S. manufacturing environment.

SQC is not a new concept at all, but it was largely ignored in the United States. The contribution of SQC (more accurately, Deming's and Juran's SQC precepts) to Japanese manufacturing quality has by now become a matter of folklore. This does not mean, however, that the SQC “philosophy” is correctly understood by U.S. companies. SQC is often viewed too narrowly as a production tool, or S and C in SQC are given undue attention. SQC is much more than a collection of statistical techniques. Indeed, the major impact of SQC results not from its engineering or technical attributes but from the changes it brings about in attitudes and in a factory's social organization. Drucker has identified SQC as one of the four concepts in the emerging theory of manufacturing.

Aluminum alloy 3004 (Al-1.0 Mn-1.0 Mg) is the predominant material of choice for use in rigid beverage containers. The mechanical property requirements of the draw and iron forming operation dictate careful control of the aluminum sheet production parameters. The demand for ever lighter weight beverage containers has also continued to place increased demands on the strength requirements of the aluminum can stock. To achieve the strength requirements, the sheet must be produced in a highly cold-worked state. A practical consequence of this required level of cold work is pronounced mechanical and crystallographic anisotropy. Without careful control of can stock production parameters, pronounced rolling textures can lead to an undesirable directionality of properties that produce ears, formed during the deep drawing operation of can making, located 45° to the rolling direction. Figure 1 shows the rolling texture ears in a drawn and ironed beverage can.

This article illustrates the minimization and control of rolling texture earing in cold rolled 3004 alloy beverage can stock through modification of the fabricating process, application of metallurgical theory, optimization of hot rolling practice through empirical experimentation, and process control practices.

An engineer or a research scientist developing a new process is not often encouraged to build quality systems into the product or manufacturing process. However, today's market places greater emphasis and focus on stability and reliability of manufactured products. Corning has developed “quality architecture” to help engineers and scientists define and build the system elements that allow quality to be built into a product, rather than rely on inspection. A researcher or engineer can then provide a first-generation prototype of the quality systems, in addition to the first-generation prototypes of equipment and processes.

What is Quality Architecture?

Quality architecture involves designing a system that controls the manufacturing process in a stable and consistent manner, and provides for continuous improvement. The architecture defines and ensures the appropriate interdependence between product specifications, materials used in and by the process, product and process measurements, statistical process control and information systems. This results in a consistent and reliable product—features valued in today's market.