Finding and optimising the key factors for the multiple-response manufacturing process

With the advent of modern technology, manufacturing processes became so sophisticated that a single quality characteristic cannot reflect the true product quality. Thus, it is essential to perform the key factor analysis for the manufacturing process with multiple-input (factors) and multiple-output (responses). In this paper, an integrated approach of using the desirability function in conjunction with the Mahalanobis-Taguchi-Gram Schmit (MTGS) system is proposed in order to find and optimise the key factors for a multiple-response manufacturing process. The aim of using the MTGS method is to standardise and orthogonalise the multiple responses so that the Mahalanobis distance for each run can be calculated and the multi-normal assumption for the correlated responses can be relaxed. A realistic example of the solder paste stencil printing process is then used to demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed approach in a practical application.