685 An Improvement on the Handling Time for Unsymmetrical Product during Visual Inspection - A Case Study Nur Syazwani Abd Suki, Shahrul Kamaruddin School of Mechanical Engineering Universiti Sains Malaysia Engineering Campus, 14300 Nibong Tebal, Penang, Malaysia Elmi Abu Bakar School of Aerospace Engineering Universiti Sains Malaysia Engineering Campus, 14300 Nibong Tebal, Penang, Malaysia Abstract Quality inspection is a crucial activity in manufacturing by practicing a standard procedure for inspection before product delivery. The improvement of inspection time becomes a focal point of the visual inspection activities due to the handling time of product after inspection which received less attention by the practitioners. In practical, high handling time normally occur by virtue of operators who taking a long time in handling the products, especially unsymmetrical products after inspection; thus lead to delay of subsequent process. In this paper, a proper methodology of solving high handling time problem is proposed by adopting seven new quality tools such as affinity diagram and Process Decision Program Chart (PDPC). The analysis of the tools is to determine the factors that affect the handling time and subsequently develop a solution to minimize the handling time by making improvements on this quality work. A supporting jig is selected as the solution to countermeasure the problem, hence can achieve 34% of improvement in reducing handling time. The supporting jig is proven to be an effective method in minimizing the handling time and implemented to a case study conducted in a semiconductor company. Keywords Quality inspection, handling time, visual inspection, unsymmetrical product, affinity diagram, PDPC, supporting jig 1. Introduction Nowadays, quality inspection has become the most basic and essential part in manufacturing industry in order to maintain customer satisfaction. It also is kept efficient to reduce the cost for the company. Inspection, is an activity to locate faulty items characterized by certain defects, in which plays vital elements in manufacturing to maintain process control and ensuring the customers will receive good products instead of faulty (Garrett et al. 2001). Most of this inspection tends to be visual, involving an examination for defects resulting in a decision to accept or reject a product on the basis of the basis of defect severity (Hou, 1992). Visual inspection normally performs by the operators in the traditional way of quality control, in which the inspection is done manually by using all human senses, such as vision, hearing, touch and smell. There are two primary functions of visual inspection, which are visual search and decision making (Drury, 1975). Both functions are the main determinants in the performance of an inspection that greatly affect the success of the inspection task. The process of manual visual inspection is highly dependent on the operators. The natures of human that possess the ability to make decisions is what makes operators desirable for inspection tasks (George et al. 2003). Although automated inspections performing much faster with fewer errors, but it is still unable to surpass the superior decision making capabilities of humans. The inherent flexibility along with the superior decision making capabilities are the main factor that human remain an integral part of some inspection tasks (Micalizzi and Goldberg, 1989). Hence, a human inspector is still outperforming machines in most attribute in visual inspection tasks (Xiachun et al., 2003). Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Bali, Indonesia, January 7 – 9, 2014