Technical Paper:

Fiber Optic Cable Assembly Manufacturing Process Improvements: The Often-Overlooked Benefits of Industry Standards

Industry Standards for fiber optic cable assembly production exist, in part, to provide guidance to manufacturers on how to build quality product and avoid quality issues. For those new to the cable assembly market – or those serving a smaller, more specialized market – such formal Standards can be intimidating.

Often, the requirements are dismissed as unnecessary increases to complexity and cost, and the Standards are overlooked. However, industry Standards can provide a great deal of insight. Standards can be of excellent guidance to develop manufacturing systems that prevent major product quality problems including field failures that prove to be catastrophically expensive to resolve. This paper addresses four general processes of typical fiber optic cable assembly production, some important sub-tasks, how they can contribute to product quality, real-world examples of costly quality problems, and how the guidance provided by Standards can help to prevent the occurrence of serious quality issues.