Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1213413
FEBRUARY 2020 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 45 Burke: We partner closely with a number of large EMS companies. In particular, we have a global role with Flex that we're going with connecting up all of their machines across the world. Johnson: How is that integration process roll- ing out? How much time seems to be involved in implementing this? It would seem on the surface like this could be a significant project. Burke: A global rollout definitely takes time to get everything in place, but what we're find- ing is that some of the modern techniques we bring to bear can accelerate it because you don't upgrade machines, and you don't need to install hardware on all the machines. It's just software and connections, and it can hap- pen very quickly once you get the right sort of alignment of what we're doing and going to roll out. Then, it's about going from the class of machine to machine. Johnson: To get data that I can use for busi- ness decisions, what's involved there? I'm just imagining being a manufacturing manager. Burke: I was talking about a couple of differ- ent levels. One level is the site level—ultimate- ly, lines in a building in a site. It starts with the data broker, so this is a software product that can live on the site, depending on differ- ent customers; they may prefer it differently. They might prefer regional versus local, but it can be either. Then, there's the aggregation point where data goes. From there, you start connecting individual machines. At that point, you have information that you can use to feed dashboards at the site level or to aggregate site by site. Johnson: On the business decision side, is the set-up process fairly straightforward and quick? Burke: Absolutely. Often, we find that we're able to install much faster than it took us to have the meeting to decide to install. It's a very straightforward, modern software application; it's not a week-long process. We have access, put it on the server, and it's up and running. We go to the machine, connect it, and it's done. It's very fast. Johnson: With customers already starting to roll this out, are they starting to see an ROI for this? Burke: Yes. We have seen a couple of specific ROIs. One case that's very interesting is uni- fying different ways of getting the same data from the same machine rather than having each individual system connect directly to the machine and duplicate a lot of work and have a lot of silo knowledge site by site. You have one application, and now your internal appli- cations can be standardized and rolled across many sites because there's no difference from site to site. Rather than a per-site dashboard, you can have a global dashboard and can roll it out to a site or to another site. Johnson: That sounds like there's significant progress toward taking the data that we can now collect in Industry 4.0 and making it an analyzable part of the decision-making pro- cess. Burke: Exactly. Johnson: Fantastic. Thanks for your time. Burke: Thank you very much. It was my plea- sure. PCB007 To watch this Real Time with… video interview from IPC APEX EXPO 2020, click here. Rather than a per-site dashboard, you can have a global dashboard and can roll it out to a site or to another site.