Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1228683
32 SMT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2020 have the greatest opportunity to gain from this situation. Reuven: In all my sessions, I'm trying to con- tinuously explain to them that the three things are combined: digitalization, innovation, and excellence. Again, I go back to my startup mentality. Innovation doesn't have to be to the extreme. You don't have to change the entire length of the line with robots or AGVs. Innova- tion can start with something very basic. You can innovate by improving your changeover by 20%. If you improve the changeover in your factory even by 10%, you reduce the time by two or three minutes and will be the employee of the month. Johnson: Your point is contained in your earlier anecdote. Basic shop floor utilization brought a different conclusion. "We need to buy another oven." That's innovative. Reuven: Yes, but it's a mindset. This person that was skeptical about buying an entire line and said, "I want to find out what's going on here. I want to look at the numbers. I want to see how we are using the equipment." It's okay if you don't have this ability, a floor man- ager, or any kind of basic dashboard of analyt- ics that you can drill down because you don't need to be a data scientist. You don't have to do machine-learning algorithms or predictive maintenance to find out the solution, but you must be open to the fact that there may be a better way to do it. Once, our business consultant visited a cus- tomer to look at how many lines, etc. He sat there for about a week with a stopwatch, mea- suring various things, and came back and said, "They're o n l y u s i n g 4 0 % o f t h e machine The margins in electronics are very small. You have a 7–8% margin because the mate- rial is super expensive. If you save three min- utes on one machine, there are three machines per line, and the line is working 20 hours for six days a week, you can multiply the three minutes that the machine stops because you need to bring a new reel and change it since it didn't bring it on time. When you're thinking about it from the basic level, you would say, "I don't need to invest $100,000 in a software piece that will save me three minutes." How- ever, there is no problem here. Johnson: That three minutes of time, accumu- lated, can double your margin. Reuven: Exactly. You should not think, "I don't have a real problem because three minutes is not a big deal. I will get the reel and replace it. No problem. It's fine." We had one customer who had three SMT lines in their factory. They didn't have enough capacity, and they were considering the pur- chase of another line. The people who usually buy the machines said, "We just need to buy another line. Let's do it," but someone at the operator level that was not fully convinced. The operator did some drill-down to analyze the situation, including finding out what the real usage and availability were and where the bottleneck was in the manufacturing process. The operator made some calculations using very simple analytics. I'm not talking about machine learning or artificial intelligence—just basic analytics, asking some questions and looking into the data. They concluded that, on average, they wait 60 hours a month for the reflow oven. With that, they went back to the department that was pushing to buy another line and said, "We can just buy another oven and move the PCBs that are stuck over to the other oven." I think it was a difference of $1.5 million in purchasing the new equipment. Matties: How do we get more people excited? We've talked a lot about what the barriers are, whether it's labor, skill, expertise, or finances, but it's going to be the leaders that Again, I go back to my startup mentality. Innovation doesn't have to be to the extreme.