Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1313710
62 SMT007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2020 as material and product logistics, as well as planning optimization and quality control. As product-mix has increased, the whole of the shop floor gets into a mess, with con- tinuous fire-fighting. This is not the profile of people that we need for smart manufacturing; in other words, we cannot replace the skilled experts that we once had with unskilled work- ers. As the industry has trended away from mass production toward the extreme of mass- customization, we need to reinvent the tech- nologies that are associated with these factory- level functions. As automated machines reduced the need for manual work in terms of core manufactur- ing technology and assembly activities, soft- ware automation replaces the dull and repeti- tive calculations done currently by people who are using tools such as Excel to perform their planning, material management, and qual- ity control, in addition to legacy ERP or even MES systems. The way going forward in terms of factory operational improvement is digital, and the people needed are those who under- stand how to utilize software and systems to improve manufacturing and how to differenti- ate between them. The use of real-time data within manufac- turing thus far has been limited; it has been constrained by a lack of timely availability of data that has a consistent meaning and can be trusted to be used for investigative processes and decision making. The main driver toward digitalization for most companies has been the gathering of traceability data, which itself has been a haphazard affair. Thankfully, the digital manufacturing world is finally going through the revolution long promised by Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing. Industry stan- dards—most notably from IPC in the form of the Connected Factory Exchange (CFX), the IPC Digital Twin, exact traceability of IPC-1782, as well as the Digital Product Model Exchange (DPMX), which is also known as IPC-2581— enable completely reliable interoperability of data when used with the right tools. Having standards in place, however, is only the start. Few applications in the realm of MES, etc., have been ready for these tech- comes from the observation that the location at which this know-how resides has changed from once being needed in each and every SMT factory across the world to now being within the domain of the machine vendor and mate- rials suppliers. Today, we trust the machines and materials that we buy—sophisticated, matured, yet progressive commodities that simply perform the intended work efficiently and reliably. Creating an SMT configuration to meet any line configuration requirement is as easy today as ordering off-the-shelf products, selecting the best tools for the job from any one of many vendors. This has all coincided with the trend of experts in the core technologies leaving manu- facturing either to go on to work with machine vendors or simply retiring. The key ques- tion is, "Does this create a void?" Up to fairly recently, perhaps yes, but now I don't think that it is such a serious issue. If our minds stay in the "analog" factory of yesterday, we have everything pretty much covered, with results in terms of efficiency, productivity, flexibility, and quality being as good as they ever can be. Any incremental challenges today are met pre- dominantly by vendors, and manufacturing can continue as is. Of course, this is not an option. Factory-cen- tric improvements now become the differen- tiators. In many areas, the consequence of variation continues to present challenges, but the details needed to identify anomalies in a timely fashion and then track the root causes are not practically possible for humans to do unaided. In areas of low labor cost, we have already seen many people with relatively low skills being thrown at these challenges, such Any incremental challenges today are met predominantly by vendors, and manufacturing can continue as is.