All-In-One MES Delivers Tangible ROI for FLTC

The Challenge

Funai Lexington Technology Corporation (FLTC), based in Lexington, Kentucky, provides thermal inkjet microfluidic solutions for specialty printing applications. As product complexity grew, FLTC found itself managing three critical operational areas (production track & trace, equipment maintenance management, and quality management) through a fragmented combination of paper travelers, spreadsheets, and disconnected point tools.

The lack of a unified system meant that audit preparation was time-consuming, process changes were slow to propagate across the facility, and yield excursions could go undetected until significant damage was done. FLTC engaged CRS in July 2020 to find an all-in-one solution that could handle MES, MMS, and QMS in a single platform at a price point that made sense for a mid-size manufacturer.

The ToolTrack Solution

By October 2020, just three months after engagement, CRS had customized and deployed ToolTrack for FLTC as a fully hosted SaaS solution. The platform provided a single source of real-time data accessible from any device, covering:

• Production Track & Trace (MES) — end-to-end lot and wafer tracking across the facility with controlled experiment releases and revision-managed process documentation.
• Equipment Maintenance Management (MMS) — proactive maintenance scheduling and SPC rules that surface equipment issues before they impact yield.
• Quality Management (QMS) — Corrective & Preventive Action (CAPA) tracking and document revision control, all within the same interface used on the shop floor.

The hosted architecture also meant that corporate and partner sites could seamlessly share and approve new process developments and operating procedures with strict permission control, with no VPNs or file-sharing workarounds required.

Results

During the development and pre-production phases of a new flagship product, the return on investment became clear. ToolTrack enabled FLTC engineers to quickly identify and quantify a critical yield issue through proactive SPC rules, then use controlled experiment releases to systematically drive improvements. The outcome was dramatic:

Similar yield excursions in the past had taken significantly longer to resolve when teams were forced to correlate data across disconnected spreadsheets and paper travelers. With ToolTrack, real-time data, CAPA tracking, and document revision control are all managed in a single user interface, eliminating the coordination overhead that previously slowed response times.