Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1275152
36 SMT007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2020 Black: It's about one year. If you're efficient, it can be 8–9 months. If it's less of an impact, it can be 1.5 years. Feinberg: At this point, what percentage of the industry do you think is using your inventory system or a similar inventory system? Astle: It's still in the early growth period. I would say 10–15% with all of the com- petitors and tow- ers being installed. This was invented by Essegi, which is a small contract house as well. The necessity is the mother of all invention; their cus- tomers said, "Where did you get that?" They responded, "We made it." Their cus- tomers would want one because it fits in small contract houses and the motherships like San- mina and Flextronics. Black: Essegi Automation spun off the auto- mation division into a separate company, and JUKI Corporation invested and bought 49%. The original shareholders of Essegi owned 51%, and JUKI Corporation in Japan probably owns 49%. JUKI saw this as an important area, and that's when they invested money in it. Feinberg: I think you are in a great position. Matties: You're making a strong case that the smallest of EMS companies with limited resources can become much more efficient with this system. Their labor force could keep the lines running consistently rather than having to stop to pull parts. With such a quick ROI, it seems like this would be a priority purchase for the smallest of EMS companies. Do they see it that way, or do they see it differently? Black: Some do, but others don't, as always. One company has only 20 employees, but they have three towers, which they bought very early. One of the things that has made us success- ful is we decided at the beginning that instead of just selling this tower to JUKI customers, we would integrate it into anybody's placement machine. Well over 60% are at the customers of other people's placement machines. We've made an effort to integrate our software so that we can talk to any placement machine and give the same productivity. That has been a big fac- tor in our success as well. Matties: That's an important strategy to be part of the 4.0 or digital factory solution because if you isolate to oppose the environment, you close off a lot of the market. Smart move. Nolan Johnson: It would seem like this inven- tory management application would be a rather obvious first step into factory automa- tion for manufacturing. Black: Yes, we've enhanced that in the last year. We've added the product we call IMS or incom- ing materials station, and it's basically a table with a big glass window in the middle and a 13-megapixel camera looking up with a light- ing system. When you receive the parts fr om the vendor, you put it barcode-side down on the window, and it confirms all of the data; it also prints out a unique ID label, communicates to the ERP system that the part has been received and is the correct part, and prepares it to go into inventory. That can be used whether you have towers or whether you're still just stocking in a warehouse on shelves. It speeds up receiving considerably and prevents errors of reading the wrong barcode. We probably all see reels with 3–4 different barcode labels, depending on how many hands it's been through, from the manu- factur er to distributors to the costumer. When you read barcodes by hand with a scan- ner, which one do you read? Being able to use this camera, read all the barcodes, extract the data, formulate them to a standard format, and then print out a unique ID label for that partic- ular reel can be made in about five seconds. We sell a lot of those stations, even to people who Bill Astle Bill Astle