Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1216587
16 SMT007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2020 that what I do affects your job or your area in the factory." Then, they start to realize that this is not just about implement- ing a solution, it's not just about installing another piece of soft- ware to have traceability; it's about improving the visibility, which may sound so simple, but it's super important. This alone can justify a project. Matties: You're describing best business prac- tices. If they don't realize their systems are connected, you're taking them back to basics at that level and then overlaying digital com- munication in between. Reuven: We have some anecdotes about that. Also, people often don't understand how things affect decision-making in the factory. I can think of one example that makes a lot of sense for why you need this digitalization and what kind of advantage it can give you in sim- ple decision-making. We had one customer that had three SMT lines in their factory. They didn't have enough capacity, and they were considering the pur- chase of another line. The people who usually buy the machines said, "We just need to buy another line. Let's do it," but there was some- one at the operator level that was not fully con- vinced. The operator did some drill-down to analyze the situation. What is the real usage and avail- ability, and where's the bottleneck in the man- ufacturing process? The operator made some calculations using very simple analytics. I'm not talking about machine learning or artifi- cial intelligence—just basic analytics—asking some questions, looking into the data. They concluded that, on average, they wait 60 hours a month for the reflow oven. With that, they went back to the department that was push- ing to buy another line and said, "We can just buy another oven and move the PCBs that are stuck over to the other oven." I think it was a difference of $1.5 million in purchasing the new equipment. organizations, they sometimes hire or allocate a specific person to be in charge of the project. It's a digitalization project or an IoT project. Matties: In all fairness to IT peo- ple, they do a great job, but tra- ditional IT is not centered around designing smart manufacturing. Their jobs are more infrastructure, data security, email management, and websites. Not to minimize their work, but it seems like what you're describing is a logistics person. What you're talking about is business processes from a systems point of view. It seems like a lot of these organizations may even have a need to hire a logistics implementation expert or create this new position in the company because all this is new for manufacturing. Reuven: It's a real challenge. They think, "There's Industry 4.0, but what does it mean? We need to make everything digital, connect all the machines, and have a dashboard." There is no business context for why they even want to do all this. Matties: The case could again be made that you're lowering costs, adding capacity, increas- ing yields, and reducing human touch time. There are so many benefits, but the barriers to entry seem overwhelming from their point of view. Reuven: Usually, when we get into this kind of situation, the business consultants in our group will go in for a workshop, and they will try to break down the silos. It's not a sales activity. It has nothing to do with what we do on the software level. It's purely a form of a Lean Six-Sigma workshop where we try to map the processes in the factory. Procure- ment, material handling, and IT will all sit in the same room and hear each other; then, they will build some kind of a diagram that will show how one thing affects the other. All of a sudden, what happens during those workshops is that people say, "I didn't know Sagi Reuven