Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1058015
76 SMT007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2018 You would have thought that by now, with a few years of Industry 4.0 under our belt, that our German friends would be reveling in the success of Industry 4.0. However, recent reports show that overall factory productivity has con- tinued to decline in German companies, even though investments have been made in new automation technology. This is being called the "productivity paradox." To a growing number of people and companies, this does not come as a surprise because investment in auto ma- tion alone is still just an extension of Industry 3.0. There has been a failure to under- stand and exe- cute what Indus- try 4.0 really is, which represents f u n d a m e n t a l changes to facto - ry operation before any of the clever automation and arti- ficial intelligence (AI) tools can begin to work effectively. In the electronics manufac- turing world, we experience the worst-case scenario of effects that change has on produc- tion operations. We have accepted deep down that higher product mix leads to reduced productivity. It is easy to simply write this off as a cost of doing busi- ness where there is the need to provide flexibil- ity without an increased stock holding of fin- ished goods. However, this is not the complete story. For example, SMT machine vendors have long been making their equipment suitable for flexible production with hardware- and software-based solutions where feeders can be placed any- where on the machines. Further, SMT machine vendors have been developing techniques to provide rapid changeovers with common feeder setups for groups of similar products, and even change- overs between dis- parate products with the simple swap out of remov- able feeder trolleys. Even without these technology aids, the manual changeover time on a fully-loaded SMT placement machine time varies across companies from around five minutes to six hours, depending on the approach used. Take a look at the pit stop in a Formula One race to learn how to achieve the five minute SMT turnaround. Huge losses to achieve flexibility are not a done deal. Accelerating Tech—Insights from the Smarter Factory by Michael Ford, AEGIS SOFTWARE Resolving the Productivity Paradox