Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1022231
SEPTEMBER 2018 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 21 moving data from A to B in a much more effi- cient and faster way. But we are also defin- ing the content of that data, so that if anybody comes in and says, 'Okay, I want to connect to you CFX network.' It doesn't matter who they are or what kind of machine they've got or any kind of the historical thing. It just doesn't matter. They can plug in their machine or plug in their software, plug in their solutions, and it works. And the reason why it works is because the IoT technology is standard, but also the content, the language that that IoT is speaking is also standard," explains Ford. Traceability One of the benefits of IoT is traceability, and according to Ford, this has become very impor- tant. "People were seeing traceability as a way to avoid too much expense when product recalls had to be made or whatever; but these days, it has moved on substantially where we see traceability being used as the ultimate qual - ity tool. You make 10,000 products, and one of them is faulty. What was the unique set of circumstances that caused that defect? To solve that problem, to discover the one-off defect causes, you need to have the traceability data. But there's so much traceability data that you need; to record that manually from different kinds of machines with different formats, again going back to this old legacy kind of thing as the principle, was never going to happen. But with a tool like CFX, where you're taking the data from the machines in a standard format, and you're getting every level of detail that you need, the CFX satisfies the level-four criteria for IPC-1782. So, since you get all of that data, now you've got two inter - esting things happening: You have a huge amount of potential to work out what was that thing that caused the defect, so your quality is going to go up; and on the other hand, the cost of acquisition of that data is almost zero, because you have CFX there for another reason. You have it there for lean materials; for adaptive planning; for Industry 4.0; or for all your metrics, KPIs and all the other things you want to do in your factory. So, it's there generating benefit anyway, but it's also giving you this traceabil - ity for free. You can take the CFX data, bench- mark it against the digital product model for design, and then you can understand exactly all the quality data that you would need." Traceability goes beyond quality; one of the biggest problems right now in manufacturing is counterfeiting. "The stories that I've heard about counter- feiting are incredible considering the lengths that people go to hide counterfeit material together with genuine ones in ways that are set to defeat incoming inspection. So, no matter what you do, the only way you're going to test everything is ultimately to destroy it. And then you say, 'Well, that one was genuine, but I can't use it anymore.' It's a horrifically expen- sive problem as well, because we have to at least get through a fence where we are trusting the materials that come in, and that's a huge cost in manufacturing for us, a huge cost that we're all going to have to be paying for our electronic products in the future if we want to be safe, for example in cars or airplanes or wherever else the critical components will be used. Now, we need to put an end to coun- terfeit. It is good that we have techniques to detect it; it's great that we have techniques to avoid it; but, we need to stop it," says Ford. And the way to stop it is to make people responsible. If you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a party was responsible for the ingress of a counterfeited material, you will know the factory where it was discovered, you will be able to pinpoint the exact materials that