Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1124788
16 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2019 a few more of this product right now. Can you deliver by Monday?" you can confidently say, "Yes, I can," because you have the information at your fingertips, and you understand the flex - ibility of the automation as well as the people. Matties: And the cycle time for training some- body on the task is minimized. Ford: Yes, it should be. Matties: It's a visual show and tell. Ford: If people have the basic skills of the job, then it should be zero, so you have to give basic training. Assuming people know how a screwdriver works, you can show them a pic- ture of and point to what they're supposed to do regarding the tool. Just by looking at it, it would automatically read the barcode, CFX data connects that tool. We have CFX in tools now and soldering irons that immediately records the traceability. I know this person is trained to use this tool and has the tool in their hand, and the tool has calibration that meets the criteria of the job, so when they use the tool, everything is recorded. Matties: And every aspect of it is traceable. Ford: Right, and some people are demand- ing this. When you're working on satellites or radio telescopes, for example, you cannot afford one mistake; the same is true with air- planes and driverless cars. Redundancy is very expensive, and if you have redundancy of two or three systems, it's still going to have redun- dancy after a while. Matties: Giant companies have the resources where they can build a new factory, but for somebody that's established and doesn't have quite that level, such as Tier 2s, this is a large undertaking. What you're describing is won- derful, but it's still a journey. Ford: And most people associate that with cost. However, all of the things that we've talked about are a negative cost and a net benefit for the peo- ple who adopt them. That's how we sell our soft- ware and how people sell machines and tools. Matties: Again, I think it's about the under- standing of where, when, and how to start. Ford: Absolutely. People like to see examples because then they know that they can repeat the same thing. The cold reality is that most manufacturing operations are different, and whereas you may be comfortable to see that this success has been done here, you won - der will be the same with you, knowing that you have slightly different processes, prod- ucts, and materials and completely different people. Matties: If somebody is looking to streamline their process, for me, it starts at the sales level because if a machine is sitting 80% of the time, my first thought is there should be more sales (laughs). It's the data that comes in from the salesperson that drives everything subsequent to that. Ford: What we used to see was a horrific situ- ation in ERP, and it wasn't ERP's fault. Over a long period of time, ERP was designed to opti- mize supply and demand for the customer. However, the cost of stocking the distribution chain became very difficult and people wanted to reduce it, so they started to reduce that stock. Now, when you reduce the stock, you end up hitting zero and not having goods on the shelves, and salespeople hate that because they can't sell anymore if there are no goods to sell. As a result, they would inflate their pre- dictions in the ERP, realize they were wrong and would revise. Instead of a steady pat- tern of smooth demand, it was a square wave. Some companies have charted this toward the We have CFX in tools now and soldering irons that immediately records the traceability.