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18 SMT007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2019 Matties: The digital factory is moving forward, and it's going to happen. It's going to be a hockey stick curve as well. Where do you see the paradigm shift or the tipping point? Manor: We've seen a lot of customers who are thinking that this is for somebody else; it's for the EMS companies, both big and small. Everybody says, "It's a great idea, but it's not for me. The other company should buy it first." They're all saying, "We want it now. We understand the concept of digital twin, includ- ing the product, process, and performance." When you start talking about digitalization, we think we have a compelling story with our full digitalization solution, and we can do it. And we have our own factories, so we can test this story in the 50 Siemens factories around the world. Matties: It's a living, working tool for you rather than just a product that you're selling. Manor: Exactly. Our internal customers from the other Siemens divisions are the toughest because they don't take no for an answer, and they have the political connections; you can't fool them. But we also gained very strong inter- nal partners from this, which we didn't have as Mentor Graphics. We can say, "This is what we do today. If our NPI time for programming your product is an hour today, we want to get it down to 20 minutes. Let's do a project on how do we do that." Most of what we have to do is create a better digital twin of the product and process and send that into the line. That's another advantage. Matties: Some people understand what digital twin is, but others don't. Can you give a brief explanation of what it means? Manor: It's a good question because I think we were doing this at Mentor for many years, but we never called it a digital twin. The idea is that you have a full representation of the physical product and process and the physical equip- ment in a digital format. This allows you to do a 100% simulation and validation and to do it right the first time. The whole idea is don't debug it in practice, test it on the lines, nor do all of this QA in practice; simulate it fully so that when you go to manufacture it, you know that the product is correct. You know that your process is bulletproof, and you know you can manufacture it to a quality level that you've set and defined. That's the key thing about this. Anybody can do a lot of trial and error, but when you go to a lot size of one, if you're making 10 boards, and you need five of them to get this working, it's not reasonable; when you did 100,000, it was reasonable, but not anymore. That's why I think getting it right the first time is impor- tant, and the way to do this is with this digital twin concept. Matties: And there's a lot of profit to be made in this digital manufacturing because people complain that the profits are shrinking, but I think what's changing is the way that we're manufacturing. The profits have to be found in the new thinking, not in doing it the old way. Manor: Exactly. Matties: This was very informational. Thank you so much for your time, Oren. Manor: It's my pleasure. Thank you very much. Oren Manor is the author of The Printed Circuit Assem- bler's Guide to… Advanced Manufacturing in the Digi- tal Age. Visit I-007eBooks.com to download this and other free, educational titles. SMT007