Line Sustaining 101. Lesson 1: CART

CART - acronym for Corrective Action Request Tag. This is issued by the enemies Quality Assurance group when they find a product that fails visual and reliability criteria. When a product is verified to have a defect, the whole batch that was processed together with the defective product *yawn* will be returned to the operators for 100% inspection, and the machine where it was processed will be monitored, studied and corrected by the process engineer. If a second CART on the same defect is issued on the same machine, a Shutdown Tag will be issued. The machine cannot be used until it can be assured that the products will be free of defects.

This also means the lot with the defect will be placed on hold until it is inspected and re-gated, which may potentially miss its shipment if the inspection takes long. And if a machine is given a shutdown tag, more products will miss its shipment. In other words, production supervisors both from your department and the other departments will be breathing down your neck while you troubleshoot.


Yesterday, within my 8 hr shift, the QA issued 7 CART's to lots processed in 6 machines out of the 9 that are running.

stress? what stress?! *faints*