Tip of the Day 102: Securing Individual Alarms

Per the previous tip it may have occurred to you that you may need to make machine setup changes in order to adjust the process for viscosity changes.Using training your technician should have re-centered the process for the new material using systematic techniques (e.g. checking fill-only parts etc) The new process may be producing good parts with the different material but the viscosity warnings could still be active as noted from the graphic of the previous tip:

The re-centered process should now match the templates and alarms inside the cavity, even if the machine settings had to change to accommodate the new viscosity. Any in-cavity part alarms should not be changed because they should have been correlated to good and bad parts. Remember it is the in-cavity or “intermediate” variables that best detect changes in part quality (see page 4 of “Finding Correlations to Part Quality“, tip # 55).

So you decide to allow the technician to re-set the viscosity warning for the new material. But you do not want him to adjust the in-cavity part alarms. We sell an optional tool for the eDART‘s that lets the engineer/administrator select which alarms are secure (part quality specific) and which the technician can change (process specific). This tool adds an additional column to the Alarm Settings window that the engineer can use to select which alarms are secure and which are not.

Of course the “Security” column itself is secured so that the technician cannot change it.

Note: Even though viscosity alarm changes are allowed technicians require training so that they do not simply make random adjustments. They must also know how to pick a reasonable new set of warnings for Effective Viscosity/Fill or any other selected process alarms.