Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1022231
52 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2018 facturing infrastructure should provide for the discovery of the resources in the factory and the events supported by the resources. With this infrastructure, individual manufac- turing processes can easily share information and control, and the entire manufacturing flow is exposed for external interface. Smart appli- cations can begin connecting the individual manufacturing operations with business pro- cesses to optimize the production flow. Some example applications of this infrastructure are discussed further. Factory Intelligence Application Depending on the point of view, there are many different, yet valid, perspectives on the performance of the factory. For instance, the fact the factory is on shutdown may be sig- nificant to a planner looking at overall facto- ry capacity, but it is less significant to the pro- duction manager who simply wants to know if the machines are running efficiently when they are scheduled to run. With a mix of differ- ent customers, products, factories, lines, and machines, there may be hundreds of different KPIs to consider. Some of these measurements may be complex requiring data from multi- ple processes, for example overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) calculations, where we consider not only the performance of the fac- tory resources but also the quality of the prod- ucts being made. With all this complexity, it is often the case that a bottleneck is caused by some external force that is not being measured. A machine may not be operating because of an actual malfunction in the equipment, or it may be waiting for some upstream or downstream pro- cess. Perhaps the operator is on break, or there is a shortage of materials causing the down- time. To identify the root cause of a problem and provide for an actionable response, these external forces must be considered. A site-level factory intelligence application would need to consider information coming from the both the enterprise applications and the process applications. To begin, the process- specific applications would provide perfor- mance data regarding the status of the equip- ment being managed. Next, the site-based constraints will be used to qualify any process status based on constraints such as the overall factory schedule, material availability, or the upstream/downstream bottleneck. With information about process perfor- mance and external the constraints influenc- ing production, many optimization opportuni- ties are possible. The process-specific layer can optimize based on external knowledge from other processes and higher-level applications, while the site application layer benefits from detailed process information from each indi- vidual equipment. Closed-Loop Feedback Application A prime example of a smart application is in closed-loop feedback. In this scenario, mea- surements taken at one process are used to automatically adjust the operation of anoth- er process to maintain a consistent result. For example, the SMT machine could adjust place- ments based on drift data being measured at the AOI. A site-level analysis application would need to collect the placement and material informa- tion from the SMT machine through the pro- cess-specific application managing that equip- ment. Next, the real-time measurement results coming from the AOI will need to be collect- ed and analysed to identify a process control problem. The results of this statistical analy- sis can be fed back to the SMT machine so that adjustments and compensations can be made as appropriate for the equipment. Since a normalized interface is used at the AOI and the SMT machine, this application would function across varying platforms while allowing each individual equipment to take the optimal action for its technology. Finite Planning Application The finite planning of the SMT schedule rep- resents a significant opportunity to improve and optimize through automation and com- puterization. In the typical situation, the ERP system manages the customer demand and material requirements in very course granular- ity with little detail of the resources used in