**4. Results**

The results obtained for each stage of the 8Ds methodology are shown as follows:

### *4.1. Develop the Teamwork (D1)*

The teamwork included a maintenance engineer, a processes engineer, an intern engineer, a production line manager, and two quality inspectors. The principal teamwork goals were to determine an adequate manufacturing process for part number A and to define the root causes of the defects. In order to achieve these goals, a task was assigned to each teamwork member, as summarized in Table 3. Note that each PDCA cycle step comprised at least one discipline, since the 8Ds method follows the logic of this cycle [50,70]. Additionally, disciplines are assigned to different teamwork members; i.e., no more than one discipline was assigned to more than one member.


**Table 3.** Task assignment.

Once the tasks have been assigned to the teamwork members, they have to implement an efficient communication system to keep each other informed, and as a result, guarantee the involvement of all the members in the problem-solving process. Similarly, a PDCA form was designed on Microsoft Excel® for each teamwork member to report their corresponding tasks from the PDCA cycle.

#### *4.2. Describe the Problem (D2)*

As previously mentioned, 67 cable assemblies were returned to the company by customers, who complained about either the product's poor performance or regarding unacceptable features. The main problem was that the assembly did not work; however, that can be due to several types of defects. Table 4 lists the six different types of defects that were found in the cable assemblies.


**Table 4.** Defects found in the rejected cable assemblies.

Specifically, the data in Table 4 were used to create a Pareto diagram, as shown in Figure 5. The diagram helped define which problems or defects had to be prioritized, according to their frequencies. In this sense, the most frequent defect was inverted cables, followed by a disfigured motor. Even though both wrong cable length and the lack of an ID tag were less frequent problems, they had to be solved from the root cause as well.

**Figure 5.** Pareto diagram of cable assembly defects.
