Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1284035
40 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2020 Feature by Andrew Scheuermann ARCH SYSTEMS One of the best questions we get from a potential customer goes something like this: "If my product quality is already at 99%, what can advanced technology really do with the 1% that's left?" For manufacturers talking about the 1% left behind after they've achieved the coveted 99% product quality, the answer is pretty straightforward. What can we do with that 1%? Not much. But that 1% is overrated. For manufacturers who think they have achieved 99% efficiency just because they've achieved 99% quality, they're almost always wrong. That's because no one has ever seen a manufacturer actually running anywhere near 99% efficiency and utilization. For some, that's obvious because state-of-the-art is often closer to 60%. If you are doing more than 60%, you're doing it really well in an Industry 3.0 world. When you actually start looking at the data, many of the top manu- facturers in the world have 50, 40, or even 30% efficiency or utilization to get near that 99% product quality. Industry 3.0 baked in the assumption that a trade-off was necessary and that manufacturers had to relinquish massive levels of both human and machine efficiency to achieve acceptable product qual- ity standards. In that pursuit, most competi- tive manufacturers became hyper-focused on that 99%. For example, a top electronics manufacturer was operating almost a thousand assembly lines. A high-value section of these lines had impeccable quality targeting the auto indus- try, doing so at 30 units per hour. Upon deeper analysis, it was clear there was a practical path to 45 units per hour—a 50% increase in throughput with the same people, machines, and products, adding technology for efficiency at an ROI of over 5x. This had nothing to do with the 1% scrap on those lines and every- thing to do with untapped capacity. Another top electronics manufacturer with hundreds of pick-and-place machines is oper- ating at a given throughput. Upon deeper anal- ysis, it is clear that the machines—despite The Value of the Last One Percent