Circuit board FAI reports- How do you folks deal with these?

[FloridaST]

I'm looking for ideas on how best to create a First Article Inspection on completed circuit boards (PCBAs). Not the raw board, the populated board.

Our current process follows AS9102 but it's all done by hand. Bubble numbering the drawing, entering the BOM into excel (sometimes hundreds of components), coloring in the drawing to indicate when components are verified against the first article board. It's tedious and it doesn't look professional. Can someone recommend software to help create these more quickly and professionally?

I looked into DISCUS but it's more suited towards machined parts though I can make it work for what I need and it would certainly be more professional and easier to print and submit to customers. Thanks!

 

[Kingsld1]

RS Simmons Co: Mfg of PCB & PCBA Semi-automatic optical Inspection Machines is a hardware/ software solution. basically a camera on a xy table with custom software.
you take a picture of a golden component as you program the machine. When the program runs, it displays the golden part and the current part. Operator decides if its good, bad or marginal. Bad or marginal calls let you enter a custom error code. Excel spreadsheet report and photos are saved.

Have not used the system but it looks slick. Our company looked at it a few years ago but decided to try to duplicate the function with a vision system.

 

[FloridaST]

RS Simmons Co: Mfg of PCB & PCBA Semi-automatic optical Inspection Machines is a hardware/ software solution. basically a camera on a xy table with custom software.
you take a picture of a golden component as you program the machine. When the program runs, it displays the golden part and the current part. Operator decides if its good, bad or marginal. Bad or marginal calls let you enter a custom error code. Excel spreadsheet report and photos are saved.

Have not used the system but it looks slick. Our company looked at it a few years ago but decided to try to duplicate the function with a vision system.

That would be amazing but I'll just keep doing it the way we've always done it. It works, customers don't complain, so meh. My main problem is by the time I get to do a 1st article on a board, they've already built the whole job. Kinda defeats the purpose.

 

[APetersen]

Kinda late to this by a year, but I work for an OEM where we build our PCBAs in house. Our FAIs are completed AFTER the entire run is complete because the purpose is to verify the process not the job or run. This is the differences betweeen a First Article Inspection and a "first piece" type inspection. We do the "first piece," once our operations finish building 1 side of the board, and populate 1 board of the second they send it to our Test team, They wait for the test results before continuing.