There are no easy methods for companies to compare their manufacturing yields with other similar businesses. This procedure is a necessity to understanding their own world class manufacturing status. A common question asked by many companies is how does my process compare with other companies in terms of yield? The information does not exist or is not easily available to small and medium volume companies.

The lack of process yield data for company comparison is a problem which exists for small, medium and large volume companies and should openly be available to the industry. Many industry and research projects, which receive funding from Europe and UK Government, quote industry issues with limited data. Having data on the industry's manufacturing issues will allow future proposals to be targeted correctly.

The industry project is creating a method by which companies can compare their performance with other companies in similar market places using similar equipment. This allows each manufacturing process used to build printed board assemblies to be compared. This initially includes screen printing, component placement, reflow and wave soldering.

The most commonly used method of illustrating yield is Part Per Million (PPM) Defective. This provides a measure of the defect level against a process stage or a specific product compared against a known number of opportunities for defects to occur. There are IPC and IEC documents and procedures, which do exist to monitor a process, which are being considered during the development of the project as well as regular comments from IPC.

The use of the Internet and e-commerce is an ideal way of gathering and making this information available to the industry in a timely way. Using a combination of website and e-mail allow access to process information to gauge their own performance. A discussion group or e-mail forum may in t he future be created to discuss issues directly affecting yields and process performance. The same e-mail forum could also be used to circulate the average defect yield each month as well as it being featured on the website. The average PPM levels will be circulated to all other related forums in the industry. Although this project is co-ordinated by the SMART Group the average information is available to every company in the industry.

Although the methods and procedures do exist in a variety of sources, no co-ordinated effort has been made with small and medium volume assembly companies to assist and provide a reference on performance. With growing support for this project, process data collection can be simplified, a benchmark for each process can be defined and an ongoing reference provided to industry.