Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1253723
68 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2020 shaking and was fuming. He was going to kick me out because of the insult that I made. So, I said, "Let's measure the uptime, maybe my cal- culations are off." They said, "How do we do that?" I knew that they had five engi- neers, so I stated, "One day, it will be Charlie's turn. Every half hour, he'll go out and see if the lines are running. And if they are running, he'll put a little 'one' in an Excel spreadsheet cell. And if it's not running, he'll put a zero. He'll do that every half hour for Monday, and then it will be Mary's turn on Tues- day, and Fred's turn on Wednesday, and Sally's turn on Thursday, and Joe's turn on Friday. "Do this for two weeks, and I'll come back, and we'll see what your uptime is." They did that, and it was 9.8%. Most people don't recognize that the lines aren't running. I remember another case where a new executive joined a consulting company I worked at, and I wanted to show her what electronics assembly was. We visited a facility in Massachusetts that had 5–6 assem- bly lines, and I wanted to show her one run- ning. We were there for three hours, and in that time, none of the lines ran. They said, "We couldn't find the stencil, or one of the pieces of equipment is down." Everybody accepts these things instead of saying, "We need to do some- thing about this." Johnson: You mentioned that for our industry, world-class uptime is about 30–40%. What would be a more typical number for manufac- turing as a whole? Lasky: It depends. Some companies have fig- ured this out. I haven't toured auto factories, but many have assembly lines that run close to 24/7. Some companies understand all of this, but the electronics industry grew up in a dif- ferent way. There may be some places that are doing better than 40%, but I've been in more than 60 factories worldwide and never seen better than about 40%. In addition to uptime, one of the ways you assure that your line is the fastest it can be is that the amount of time spent by the chip shooter should be as close as possi- ble to the same amount of time spent by the flexible placer when placing compo- nents. This process is called "line balancing." In the 60 plus factories I've been in the world, I've seen only one or two that were line balanced. In some factories, the flexible placer is waiting 20 seconds for the chip shooter. If you took some of the chips off the chip shooter and put it on the flexible placer, it would decrease the cycle time by, say, two sec- onds. People hear that and then say, "Big deal. It's just two seconds," but they don't under- stand. If the cycle time on an assembly line is 30 seconds, and you can reduce it to 28, and your profitability is 2–3%, it's not going to go up whatever fraction that is; it's going to go up a lot more because again you're amortizing your fixed costs over more production. If you improve production 1%, the profit doesn't go up 1%; it goes up 2–3% because all of your fixed costs don't increase. You're making 1% more circuit boards, but your fixed costs stay the same. You don't have any more people to pay, and you use only margin- ally more electricity or whatever. These com- mon-sense business things are not understood by most managers in the electronics assembly business in my experience. Most of this pro- ductivity loss is from the tyranny of the urgent issues, with some exceptions. I'm not saying it's everybody, but at least in the 60+ factories I've been to, about 58 were bad. Matties: Dr. Ron, thank you for your time today. We greatly appreciate it. Lasky: Thanks so much. SMT007