Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1035071
42 SMT007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2018 printer—they can extract that traceability data from the printer. The board then travels through to the pick-and-place machine, using the same barcode. They can then extract the traceability for that data in another format, and go into the oven, and the AOI machine, etc. What they have now is a factory broken into small modules of traceability where they have to piece the history together. For example, if a company has a recall, they can see the serial number of the board but will have to manu- ally search through different data formats to find out what happened to that board since the time it was bought. The beauty of CFX is that you will have all the traceability data in the same format, which means it can go into the same system that connects to the central database. CFX would make searching for the history of that faulty product much easier. Las Marias: What would you like to see in the CFX standard and why? Fenton: We recently created a small list of ques- tions—less than five areas—so there isn't much else that we want to see addressed. One thing we did notice was the lack of clarity on multi- headed machines. The CFX standard, as it is currently, takes an overall machine's perfor- mance. In other words, it says the machine has stopped, is in production, or is idle. One thing we thought that was glaringly missing was if Head 1 is stopped, Head 2 is missing, and Head 3 is in idle mode—all important infor- mation if you are starting to look at real-time maintenance monitoring or error messages, for instance. There's more benefit in knowing which head is doing what than just thinking of the machine as a large box, so that was a significant suggestion. For certain accessories, such as electrical test and glue dispensers inside the pick-and- place machine, the standard pick-and-place messages were not adequate to monitor the performance of those sub-pieces inside the equipment. If it was a gluing machine, then there were CFX messages available, but we asked IPC to improve the standard as far as ize what CFX can do. Our customers are still confused as to what Industry 4.0 can do. CFX is not something that is as important to them as machine uptime, speed, and productivity. Las Marias: In a nutshell, how is CFX impact- ing the PCB assembly industry and what are its benefits? Fenton: Once the data gathering is established, the customer will be able to look at their over- all efficiency, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), underboards, bridges, and first-time yield, among others—which is something that they struggle with at the moment because the data is not in a standard format. If they look at the OEE data from their auto- mated optical inspection (AOI) machine, printer, or oven, they have to gather separate types of information and may have several different dashboards or ways to read the data. Overall, the effect of CFX will be to make productive decisions easier because users will be able to look at factory-wide statistics as opposed to individual machines. As a result, users will be able to turn the data from individual machines into a picture of what their overall factory effi - ciency is. I see this as the primary benefit. If you make something easy for a customer, they will start to use it, and then they'll see the benefit of making changes in material handling or operator training. This is the type of thing where they will be able to make small changes to their methods and see the data immediately from any machine in the factory. Las Maria: What about traceability? Fenton: Traceability suffers the same problem. Europlacer has been doing traceability outputs for many years, but it's in a proprietary format to us. It's available as a text file or a database that is read by our system. I am sure the other vendors also have propriety ways of outputting traceability. Again, this means the factory is effectively divided into different sections for traceability. Although a user might read the same barcode on the PCB—such as a PCB barcode in the