Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1275152
AUGUST 2020 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 35 Astle: There is a video of a company in Japan that runs JUKI lines for SMT, but then they invested in eight towers. They are experienc- ing almost a 30% reduction in inventory costs because of the efficiencies of knowing where the parts are, where they are on the floor at all times, and the quantity. Another ROI is the abil- ity to lower your inventory goods. Additionally, there are human mistakes. The part numbers nowadays are 30 characters long, and it's chal- lenging for a human to pull that, get it correct, go back and forth, and make sure it's exactly the right part. It happens once a week that a human will pull the wrong part. The towers are fully barcode-capable and read barcodes in and out. They don't make those types of mistakes. That's not something that we put in the ROI, but the towers eliminate those type of mistakes. Black: We're doing a project you might be interested in with an OEM customer that wanted to reduce the amount of inventory they were carrying themselves. They made agreements with three of the big components houses. We're doing software for them that when a reel goes out of the tower to the line, since they're producing high volumes of the same products, the reel doesn't come back, so it's used until it's empty. But it reports that by email directly to the vendor, who then sup- plies that part with a copy to purchasing. At the end of the day, that vendor puts all those in a box. They keep a reserve stock for the customer and FedEx them overnight. The receiving department takes them, puts them in the cases, and stacks them in the tower. The tower does the receiving and noti- fies purchasing and accounting that the part has been received. This company was able to reduce its overall inventory from $10 million to $4.5 million without losing efficiency. Industry 4.0 is a buzzword that everybody talks about, but there are some very interesting things you can do with it that result in financial benefits. Matties: You are selling an inventory manage- ment system, not just a piece of equipment. Black: Exactly. Matties: Where's the tipping point for getting somebody to look at a system like this, or is it universal, and all companies should look at this? Black: Eventually, all companies will look at it because one thing screwing the U.S., espe- cially in states like California and Washington, is that wages are going up, particularly mini- mum-wage or lower-wage hourly workers. A lot of states are setting the benchmark at $15 an hour, which means once you add loaded social costs, it's probably $22–24 an hour, depending on the state. As those increase, companies are going to look for more ways to save on labor. One big driver of automating inventory man- agement is the cost savings on labor. I have a few white papers on different sub- jects, including ones about integrating the stor- age towers into the company's ERP and MES system. We see companies saying, "This was a novelty 4–5 years ago. Why do I need that?" But today, it's an established product, and peo- ple are seriously looking at it, both from the EMS side and the OEM side. Dan Feinberg: In those lines, what is the aver- age time to get payback on the investment in your system or a similar system? ISM3600 UltraFlex Intelligent Storage System.