Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1010078
72 SMT007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2018 which is an ultrasonic that measures the concentration correctly. It takes that human factor out, or completely automates it with a system we call Zestron CM, which douses the water and the chemistry in the wash tank. It not only measures it, but adjusts for the volume loss in the cleaning tank. That helps overall by providing data in whatever other system integrates data; that's sort of our most recent endeavor to help in Industry 4.0—providing data and automating it to avoid human error. Las Marias: And you can rest assured that the cleaning bath for your system has this some sort of stability control. Wack: What a customer assumes, and their customer, in turn, is a certain product quality. And the product quality is easily affected by two or three percent below concentration limit or specified concentration of it. So, if you say you need to be 10%, then for some reason, the machine puts a little bit more DI water to sometimes adjust for low-level alarms, you go down to 5% and it might not clean anymore. And you keep running, and some of these machines—called inline machines—are big, they clean thousands of boards. So a certain batch of these boards were just cleaned at 5%. Then you have to re-run them. It's a lot of extra work, maybe it is more difficult because you run it a second time; there are just unnecessary things that you can easily avoid by using automated aspects in the process. Everybody wants to be automated and digitally connected to suppliers and customers and so on, to make less of a human aspect of it because we all make mistakes. Las Marias: Manufacturers tell us that today, communication and collaboration are critical factors to success. Is that your experience as well? Wack: We have had longstanding relationships with all the equipment manufacturers who do want to collaborate with us. Most of them do, because they see the benefit. Here's one example: A customer buys a new machine thinks that's the greatest machine ever. And then he stands in front of it and says, "I think I need to use chemistry in there," versus, maybe before, using only DI water, which didn't clean. The machine may or may not be suitable for chemistry in the first place, so he might have to retrofit it or buy a new machine, and then he realizes he made a big mistake. Collaboration usually helps the customer win because they can proactively inform themselves as to what combination, what budget or throughput, what aspects of the overall cleaning process work for them in the best way. We see ourselves as a facilitator. The tech centers we have are showrooms in a way, but they are also process specification rooms, so Dr. Harald Wack (third from right), president of Zestron, and Dr. Oskar K. Wack (second from right), founder of Dr. O.K. Wack Chemie GmbH—the parent company of Zestron—during the opening ceremony of their Taiwan technical center.