Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1189040
DECEMBER 2019 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 17 We visited the world's largest manu- facturer of air conditioning a couple years ago; they said the average batch size is 80, and they do something very common as an A/C. You would think that the average batch size is hundreds of thousands or millions, but it's 80 because it's so customized for every region, tier, market, and geography. Here, there are two challenges. The first one is new product introduction (NPI). How do you get the pro group program fast enough? That's some- thing that we have the tools for, both our DFM tool and process engineer- ing tool. We have a couple of custom- ers who also said that they used to do one or two NPIs a day; today, they're doing 20. We had one dedicated NPI line, and now all lines do NPIs, so that's a challenge. Many of them have been adding process engineers over the last few years, and what I hear from them is we can't keep doing that. We had three NPI engineers, and now we have 10, or do you want me to have 30? Where am I going to put them? I don't have any space. We need to completely rethink how we do this. They want this to be fully automated, and the program is automatically generated by a click of a button. Our connection to the Siemens PLM solution team center is very applicable. Most of the data to fuel this is coming from the PLM system, such as the BOM or CAD file. These are all managed by all of the OEMs in the PLM. We can take it and augment that with our tools on the PLM backbone. Matties: The front end is the most important in this. If you don't get that right, nothing else matters. Manor: Yes. Matties: We're calling it programs, but it's really the digital recipe that is going to commu- nicate with each individual machine. What's the advantage of a lot size of one? What role would a fabricator need to understand to rec- ognize that's a goal? Manor: It used to be that you kick the line, and you spend an hour maybe validating that the line is great, and then you manufacture for five hours. But if you have 2–10 boards, you do the one-hour setup and manufacture for 10 min- utes. You cannot make any profit that way. You have to take down this one hour that allows you to do really small chunks and work with more customers. The issue is that the end cus- tomers want customizable products. They want to go online, select a laptop, and con- figure the CPU, memory, and interfaces; then, you want the manufacturer to build it the next day and have it cost less than your previous laptop, which was made in chunks of millions. We are the ones putting this pressure on the manufacturers; now, they have to adapt because otherwise, they cannot give us what we want. Car manufacturers are doing that, and that's where the market is going. A lot size of one allows them to do that. If you are doing a lot size of one, the savings from doing it in low-cost manufacturing countries diminishes. That provides an opportunity for our custom- ers in the West, whether it's the Americas or Europe, to compete with China and Southeast Asia. If you're doing a lot size of one, labor is not the issue; it's the shipping and how fast you can get to the customer. We imagine we will see more and more of our customers man- ufacturing again where the market is.