Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1372612
32 PCB007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2021 going on in your factory. If there's a spike in your factory, all they see are 2D codes, they have no idea what's going on. But put on your HoloLens and you enter the alternative dimen- sion that tells you what's going on. Matties: I thought that's what I heard. One of the things that we hear a lot is "4.0 or smart factories are not for me. I'm high mix, low vol- ume, it's easier for me to go in and set up my drill." On the other side we hear, "We're au- tomated." And when we ask what they mean, they reply, "We have our loaders and unload- ers." at's two different levels of automation. One is mechanizing your factory with automa- tion. Yet, with 4.0, we're really talking about automating the process parameters through AI. I think there's a distinction that needs to be made. How would you answer that? Zajac: It really comes from a lack of under- standing about what 4.0 brings to the table. One of the biggest ROIs I've seen was $25 million in nine months just from implement- ing 4.0. ere is a huge, uncaptured poten- tial in many factories. For instance, analyzing your OEEs (overall equipment effectiveness, measuring the percentage of manufacturing time that is truly productive) brings to atten- tion that you're probably wast- ing 60% of your resources or time in production—for a vari- ety of reasons. But only aer it becomes apparent can you take action. To succeed, you must at least follow the leaders of the in- dustry like Amazon, Tesla, and Boeing. Matties: Well, those are extreme resources that most shops don't have. You would need to scale it down to an example like Green- Source—something that people can relate to. Zajac: Right. Even in the case of GreenSource— a factory with high mix composition of prod- uct—it still brings a huge benefit. You are able to have your OEEs ramped up completely, es- pecially in high mix, and for smaller companies with manual labor it helps in thinking about how you can schedule things. is is where you can see the biggest benefits. With high volume, there are probably different benefits, schedul- ing for example. Nolan Johnson: Robert, one of the things that intrigues me about moving Industry 4.0 into PCB fabrication is how you set up the AI to monitor your processes. If you look at a tra- ditional manufacturing environment like au- tomotive or other consumer goods, the typi- cal process for setting up the AI is to have hu- man experts go through and give a yes-no type of response to quality examples coming off the line; the AI then builds off that and grows its intelligence. It's a little bit different in wet pro- cesses, in that what happens in this tank can af- fect what happens at that other machine fur- ther down the line. How do you envision set- ting up the AI to track the processes? Zajac: First, you set the points that you want to reach. For instance, you have a set of mea-