MRO Today - Sony: the new face of MRO

Sony: the new face of MRO

Meet the new face of MRO. Patrick Kippes has been a process engineer at Sony DADC’s Terre Haute, Ind. plant for two years. It is his first job out of college. He has taken part in several maintenance and productivity Six Sigma projects. One recent project involves building a network of domestic vendors for parts that had previously only been available from international suppliers.

“The project started because our maintenance and repair budget for tooling was very high, so we came up with two approaches to address that,” Patrick explains. “First, we are qualifying new vendors domestically who can improve our cost and lead time on new parts. Secondly, we are refurbishing existing parts so we don’t always need to buy new.”

CD and DVD replication on the scale Sony does it, up to 1.4 2 million units a day, involves banks of machines that press discs, much like LP records used to be made. There is no “burning” process as such at this level of production.

This means several things, among them that parts must be kept immaculately clean and tolerances, typically in the three- to five-micron range, must be maintained.

In the past, when wear parts began to drift out of tolerance, new ones were needed to replace them. But today’s replication process at Sony is very much one of ongoing innovation. The competitive nature of the business dictates it. So maintenance and engineering teams at Sony are charged not only with increasing production and equipment reliability, but also to accomplish this and save money at the same time. Sound familiar?

“With newer technologies we’re able to rework parts that were out of spec before and add material to those parts to bring them back into spec so they can be used again,” Patrick explains. “We injection mold the polycarbonate discs for all formats so you’re looking at stainless steel and chrome parts for alignment purposes in the mold, for cutting the center hole and forming the actual disc.”

All these parts are subject to wear. At predetermined intervals, Sony technicians pull that tool out of the machine and check the critical components. Some parts must be changed after a certain number of “shots,” but at other times finished product inspections will reveal a part that is prematurely wearing.

“A lot of these parts are high-polish surfaces that are extremely sensitive to polycarbonate flow in the mold. On most of these parts you’re looking at a three- to five-micron window for any spec, which is pretty tight. So for a vendor to be able to make that same part over and over is pretty important to us. Not everybody can do that — we tried several domestic vendors that weren’t successful.”

In the past, all those parts were simply replaced with new ones, at considerable expense. Today, thanks to Six Sigma programs, some parts can be refurbished. Some are refurbished by press fitting a sleeve over the cutting edge that allows the worn part to be brought back into spec by applying chrome or nickel plating to restore cutting edge tolerances.

Other parts benefit from more advanced solutions. Patrick’s team has discovered domestic vendors that can utilize nanotechnology to make those surfaces either frictionless or harder than steel or chrome, leading to longer useful life.

In 2005 Sony’s Terre Haute plant saved $290,000 by refurbishing parts instead of buying new and its drive to source parts from domestic vendors saved $360,000 more.

“Other than the money savings, the lead time is probably the biggest secondary benefit we’re realized,” Patrick adds. “Now that we have found domestic suppliers for those parts at the tolerances we need, we’re not waiting for a part to come from overseas — it’s always faster if the part is just a couple hundred miles down the road.”

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