Reducing the wear costs of Ericsson’s test equipment: 2 cases

Sammanfattning: This thesis has attempted to reduce costs associated with wear parts in test equipment at Ericsson’s master and industrialization center (MIC) in Kista. Two different cases have been pursued, and each has been designed to follow a, for the purpose, adapted version of the design research methodology (DRM). The adapted model was presented and its use in both cases was additionally evaluated. Both cases were based on products that already have been launched and are used in production. In order to avoid expensive changes to surrounding equipment, incremental product development was chosen in both cases. The first case focused on test equipment used in the production of digital units for radio base stations. After the wear parts of this test equipment were examined, it was found that a plastic detail was manufactured through milling and as a result was quite expensive. The plastic detail was redesigned so that it could be manufactured using the injection molding process instead. This resulted in an estimated cost reduction of 48 %. The second case focused on wear parts of test fixtures used in the production of radio filters, also used in Ericsson’s radio base stations. A more process-oriented view was adopted in this case and parameters believed to be causing added wear such as positional and angular misalignment were examined further. Tolerance chains for each wear part in the assembled test fixture were calculated to determine the degrees of possible misalignment. The resulting data did however not correlate with each wear part’s individual wear interval, and no concrete cost reductive improvements could be delivered. Instead suggestions which can lead to further cost reductions in the long term were presented. The model used to develop improvements for these two cases was found to have helped the process in both cases, however further research of this model is recommended in order to determine if it is suitable for these types of projects in general