Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1440051
14 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2022 core, proven technology, and we can tie all of that together with our KSMART Advanced Process Monitoring and Control smart factory soware. We also have IPC APEX EXPO back to a live event, and lots of good things going on with that, so we are certainly looking forward to a good year in 2022. Johnson: Which is the dog, and which is the tail? Is smart factory causing equipment pur- chases, or are your customers more likely to be getting new equipment because they need it and, while they're at it, they decide to add some smart factory features? Scutchfield: ere's some of both. Folks are starting to look at their purchases not as a sin- gle machine purchase as maybe they have in the past. ey're considering, rightly so, ev- erything that the potential providers can bring to the table from an inspection systems per- spective, but also, a smart factory perspective. Knowing what those suppliers are doing, what their roadmap looks like from a development, R&D perspective for new systems, application of the technology, and new and better ways to generate the data needed for smart factory at- tainment, is more important than ever. I like to say, for example, "You might be just look- ing at an SPI machine right now to address this specific need, but you have to look at the big picture because your selection for that piece of hardware today could affect your ability to do all the things that you potentially may want to do from a smart factory perspective going for- ward." e consumers of our products need to be conscious of that and really be careful who they saddle up with. ey need to do their homework, and make sure they're not looking at things as a singular application. I think that's the piece that's changing. It intertwines "the head and the tail," if you will. Johnson: What are some of the top trends you're seeing in inspection? Scutchfield: We certainly see the expanded use of artificial intelligence in several areas. We see predictive maintenance as being something that customers continue asking for, along with the continued refinement and reduction of the human element in the programing process, and data analytics, etc. Customers are also driv- ing the trend toward more connectivity, and I don't see that going away. It's in their control. ey're going to make all of us get there. We see the expansion of more data points in the line going forward—increasing the amount of inspection being done on the line, coupled with more automation, which expands the ca- pability of smart factories due to the additional data sets, and better use of the data for mistake- proofing, and self-healing. at's really the end game. We can use our sensors—our systems— to identify that something is not quite right. Now, how do we help the other systems in the line correct for that automatically so we can self-heal on the fly? ere will be more plug-and-play as we go forward. You will see a push when we talk about sustainability, to have a more modu- lar approach as we begin to expand into oth- er areas beyond just the PCB and SMT lines to Joel Scutchfield