SMT007 Magazine

SMT-May2018

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64 SMT007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2018 uniquely identifiable; they may be located at all times and know their own production history and current status; they must be able to generate alternative routings to be able to achieve their target state/shape/functionality. Additionally, Industry 4.0 will address many of the environmental issues facing the world today, such as resource and energy efficiency. Industry 4.0 will provide a vehicle that enables continuous resource productivity and energy efficiency gains to be delivered across the entire supply chain. These embedded manufacturing systems will be vertically networked within the facto- ries' own business processes and enterprises while simultaneously being horizontally connected to the broader external supply chain that can be managed in real time—from the time an order is placed by a customer through outbound logistics to deliver the product. This will require that all aspects of the current MRP and MES systems be evaluated to understand how they can accommodate this new manu- facturing paradigm. The Connected Factory Running a typical EMS operation requires the use of many disparate software plat- forms. Business processes in manufacturing are currently often still static and implemented through extremely inflexible software systems. Much of the capital investments made over the years to support the manufacturing operations cannot simply be ripped out or replaced with newer, more flexible/service-oriented applica- tions. It therefore becomes essential to be able to integrate new technologies into older ones (or vice versa), with the older systems need- ing to be upgraded or enhanced with real-time capabilities. The magnitude of the challenges involved become quite evident once you look at the landscape of the all the different systems required to run a typical electronics manufac- turing facility (Figure 2). From the figure, it becomes obvious how challenging the task is to interconnect all the systems in such a way that data can easily be shared both vertically and horizontally across the factory infrastructure as you deal with not only engineering based tools but also all the planning and supply chain systems and the physical hardware producing the products. Adding IIoT will make it possible to create networks providing much more detailed infor- mation around the entire manufacturing process that will convert factories into a more intelligent supply chain engine. As mentioned earlier, the production system will be comprised of smarter machines, material warehous- ing systems (i.e., automated material towers) Figure 2: A typical electronics manufacturing facility.

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