Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1406534
22 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2021 field site builds outside of Asia. What is your advice for an existing facility looking to be- come more digital, more "smart," in manufac- turing? Lewis: Whether you are a new or existing man- ufacturer, the need to work smarter and avoid cost overruns, scrap, and delays is critical to your survival. e great thing about cloud so- lutions is that they don't require the technical support or overhead to quickly adopt. Com- panies no longer have to install soware or set up virtual private networks (VPNs) to pro- tect their intellectual property (IP). Cloud so- lutions are designed with security and ease of use so that every member of the supply chain can access and collaborate with their partners. With this in mind, we see many manufac- turers striving to enable more collaborative means of communication with their custom- ers and cross-functional teams. Processes like design for manufacturability (DFM) should in- clude the original design teams and their print- ed circuit board assembly (PCBA) suppliers to eliminate quality issues and manufacturing de- lays. Legacy practices of emailing or providing access to large, static data packages create re- vision confusion. Cloud soware enables dy- namic communication practices to provide the latest, real-time product information and dig- ital thread or persistent record of the prod- uct design as it moves from new product de- velopment (NPD) to product launch. Work- ing smarter just means that you create process- es that are more inclusive of the customer, so product development and commercialization processes can be executed rapidly to yield high- er-quality products on time and under budget. Johnson: To that end, what are some of the most common difficulties manufacturers face in integrating a PLM or a quality management system (QMS) into their existing systems? Lewis: Manual, siloed, or paper-based legacy practices and processes can inhibit growth for any manufacturer looking to engage their cus- tomers and supply chain partners with a PLM or QMS soware system. For instance, the need to create continual reports just to track, monitor, and approve BOMs or other de- sign changes is typically not required because cloud-based soware-as-a-service (SaaS) sys- tems do this automatically. Furthermore, leg- acy practices that include serial review pro- cesses are no longer needed when you use so- ware. You can create parallel review and ap- proval processes for teams, where applicable, to speed the time to approve new designs or changes. Older on-premises PLM or QMS soware solutions are also more difficult to implement, use across geographically dispersed supply chains, and maintain. ese older client/serv- er solutions were not architected for the cloud and create additional deployment challenges, communication latency, and barriers to adop- tion. Today's manufacturers should seek to lever- age PLM and QMS soware to collaborate on the entire mechanical, electrical, and so- ware product design record to ensure the com- George Lewis