Nordson ASYMTEX: XFMEA and BlockSim to Less Costs for Industrial Robots

Challenge

"I came in and I saw the need to improve and add [reliability tools] to our tool base for implementing reliability. The first thing that I saw was that we were using Excel spreadsheets for FMEAs. I really like the way that XFMEA helps us organize things, and the way we can classify failure modes and causes. And actually pull them back, so we are not constantly writing the same failure mode or cause ten different ways. So we can actually group and categorize things."

Solution

"I like the idea of having a single database where I can look up things from the Design FMEA and the Process FMEA. Also to be able to use that as kind of a communications vehicle between the design and reliability engineers, who are doing the Design FMEA, and the manufacturing and quality engineers, who are really the guys who are responsible for the Process FMEA. So having that kind of communications bridge of XFMEA really helped us out."

Value

"Our customers are interested in cost of ownership. It might be something like a dollar per a million dots dispensed. Or it might be something like dollars per year. We really needed a way to quantify what that cost of ownership was. So using BlockSim gives us a great tool to do that. We can put in what our maintenance intervals are. For each type of component, we can try to optimize the cost of ownership based on what the failure distribution is."