Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1189040
78 SMT007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2019 Johnson: How do you shift from that to an Industry 4.0 and monitoring environment? Kantelal: There are a lot of different types of water wells, including digital and analog meter systems. At the end of the day, we were ret- rofitting legacy equipment in water wells in Tanzania and other parts of Africa. It's the same technology, and we're still retrofitting machines, but in this case, they are now on the manufacturing floor, not in remote villages. You still need to understand machines, how they work, and which are analog and digital. If they're digital, what do they have, and how do you get data out of it? Even if it doesn't neces- sarily give you that data that you want. How can you read and understand the machine to be able to extract what's meaningful? Johnson: So far, it sounds like a consulting pro- cess. Kantelal: There's always going to be an element of that. We work with large enterprise custom- ers. Each one will have their own needs and manufacturing specificities, but we do have products. ArchFX Broker and ArxhFX cloud are single, scalable products. There are two ele- ments where consulting can come in, expand- ing our sets of connectors if a customer has machines we've never seen. A big part of our core IP is the ability to make new connectors literally 10x faster and cheaper than any stan- dard consulting approach. The other would be in working with customers on unique business propositions beyond our global KPIs and pre- dictive maintenance offerings. So, yes, we do that, and we also partner with other consul- tants to help large manufacturers learn how to digitize step by step. The technology we've developed makes it easily customizable, but the library of con- nectors and extraction methods is there. It's a product, and then we also have the software on top of it that's standardized. We have a broker that takes all this data that we collect from dif- ferent sources and logs and scans it into a stan- dard, such as IPC CFX. Then, we build appli- cations on top of it or allow our customers to build applications or our partners to develop applications on top of it. In that sense, it's definitely a product, but it's always going to have some element of under- standing what the customers want and making sure that we provide them that ROI. We don't go out and sell Industry 4.0, AI, and ML. We ask, "What are your biggest pain points? These are the ways we can help you," such as using machine data and analytics. It's about mak- ing sure that you're giving what the customers need and the ROI; it's not just about making sure they have an industrial solution. Johnson: Is there much work with brownfield facilities, retrofitting, and brand new construc- tion? Kantelal: Yes. The reality is a large percentage of the manufacturing out there in electronics and other industries is going to be a mix of new equipment that has IPC CFX, Hermes, and connectors and easy ways to tap data out and legacy machines that are 5–20 years old. It's about combining all these because a lot of the value of Industry 4.0 comes from understand- ing and getting data from across the entire floor and all the lines; we facilitate that to happen. Johnson: One of the major market drivers is that the various electronics manufacturers say that the market is driving down their margins; they don't have the profitability they used to. It has also been suggested elsewhere that most of their profit margins are ending up in the scrap pile. They're funding their waste with their old methodologies. New, digital method- ologies eliminate the waste and put the mar- gin back into their pockets. Does that ring true with you? Kantelal: Absolutely. For example, with Flex, we're building a global OEE launching solu- tion, which, if you are able to understand your OEE not just in one line but across all your lines in all your factories, as well as SMT lines across the world, you start to see things. You can decide how to manage your assets. If you understand what's going on in your line and are