Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1022231
24 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2018 ing mix of roles to do throughout the day. "Now, the whole thing about being a produc- tion operator means that instead of just stuffing boards, you are operating many different facets of manufacturing and you're much more a part of the solution. So, I see that people are going to be a lot more flexible, and they're going to get a lot more job satisfaction from their abil- ity to do more and have a much nicer environ- ment to work," says Ford. Ultimately, it will be a streamlined work- force because one goal in adopting technol- ogies such as IoT and CFX is to reduce total labor cost. "You can walk along production lines, and see people who are working extremely hard, and those who are not. You go back, and it's the reverse case. So, you keep a certain number of people in each different kind of role. If you've got people who are much more flexible, then you can have a lot less people. I saw an example in material logistics where we were not able to track what the logistics requirement was. You had to cover the peak, and so if you figured that five or six lines were going to change over at the same time, and you needed a certain rate of materials to be supplied, you had manpower to cover that. But guess what? Around 90% of the time, a lot of that manpower had noth- ing to do. If you knew exactly what manpower you were going to need and when, you could repurpose people from another pool to work in that pool. Overall, we saw a 30% reduction in overall manpower requirement, and that's just in a simple area like logistics," says Ford. However, factories haven't fully embraced this potential. And according to Ford, the prob- lem has been the lack of IoT. "We've seen companies who have done extremely well with lean materials. They've got the machine connections. They see the demand. They're doing the predictive kind of delivery of materials. We've seen people doing closed loop systems, where they have the specific interfaces in the machines and they're able to have some amazing results from what they're doing. Then it comes to the question of scaling, and they spent whatever dollars to make that line work well. How much is it going to cost to do all your other lines in the process? And then they think yeah, that's a lot of different interfaces to develop. So, quite often, even the best industrial and engineering ideas in factories, even the best of them, do not take hold simply because of the cost and the difficulty to populate them with information," Ford explains. "This is where IoT is going to really open that opportunity, because when all the machines are speaking the same language, you develop an application, whether it's by an IT guy or an engineer on the line or a machine vendor or a solution provider, they will all work together. And somebody can simply create that solution once, with one interface, and it works everywhere. This is a completely different ball- game from what we've seen before. "I saw one company recently in China where they're taking data from the SPI and using it to adjust and compensate on the solder paste and even the placement machines. They got their reject rate down to 4 PPM. It's just unbe- lievable what can be achieved, and yet they said to me, 'Look, we've got a great result here, the software we devel- oped ourselves, but we