SPC Revs Up the Power Within Briggs & Stratton Engines

As the world's largest producer of gasoline engines for outdoor power equipment, Briggs & Stratton is a universally recognized name that marked 100 years in business in 2008. The company is so firmly entrenched in the marketplace that eight out of 10 leading lawn mower manufacturers specify Briggs & Stratton for their power requirements. In addition to its engine business, Briggs & Stratton also designs and manufactures generators, pressure washers, snow throwers and a variety of other products for consumer and commercial applications.

To ensure product quality, reliability, and OEM compliance, the Briggs & Stratton facility in Auburn, AL uses Zontec's Synergy 2000™ Statistical Process Control (SPC) Software throughout the plant.

Averting Process Variation

"SPC gives us a picture of what the processes are capable of and areas where we need to focus our attention," says Quality Assurance Engineer Peter Wolf. "Our goal is to eliminate special variation short term in our processes, and over time, remove common variation in machining and assembly. Without SPC, we would make process adjustments that could be tweaks instead of improvements and ultimately increase process variation."

As important as SPC is to Briggs & Stratton internally, suppliers are likewise required to use SPC as an element in the Part Production Approval Process (PPAP) to show that they are capable of manufacturing to all of Briggs & Stratton's major dimensions.

A server-based wide-area network (WAN) is supplemented with a local-area network (LAN) for SPC. In the machining area, data from four coordinate measurement machines (CMMs) is fed into Zontec's Data Link interface program which manages the data acquisition and places the data in the appropriate Synergy 2000 Data Tables on the network server.

A Paperless Data Repository

"We record all our measurements in Synergy 2000 because it eliminates having to file and store reams of paper reports," explains Wolf. "Plus, it eliminates maintaining two tiers of quality data - some in paper and some in electronic format." Data is therefore centralized and available for immediate retrieval.

Briggs & Stratton tracks key customer dimensions and features critical to its upstream operations on Cpk charts. "We use Cpk charts as a tool to guide us on what enhancements to make," he says. "During our monthly analysis, we take a look at our Cpk data to assure processes are performing." The software also documents assignable causes for process variation and corrective actions for traceability purposes.

Prevention Less Costly Than Rework

By prioritizing where the opportunities for improvement are, and focusing on variation early on, Briggs & Stratton can avoid expensive rework during the final phases of production when each engine is fired up and tested before leaving the plant.

During the time Briggs & Stratton has been using the Synergy 2000 software, an extremely effective relationship has resulted between end-user and software developer. "When we have placed support calls, Zontec's responsiveness has been outstanding. And they have even incorporated some of our suggestions into subsequent releases of the software. That's the kind of partnership that makes us successful. In America, it is no longer acceptable to be good enough. We need to constantly re-invent ourselves with improvement, but before we can do this, we need to know where we stand with regard to quality. Zontec give us the metric to judge progress and to assure we are truly moving forward and not the reverse," concludes Wolf.