Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1447212
22 SMT007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2022 Because of this, every factory is quite unique. If you call somebody and say, "Help me fix my factory," you will get a standard solution which will be a lot more expensive than using your own small team to tweak this situation. Johnson: e idea of the integration team you were speaking about makes a lot of sense. Stepinski: I think that's the right approach. I've seen how it's done in different industries. I've gone to MIT to study Industry 4.0, and this is how people do it. It's the most cost-effective way. In our industry, everybody is very sup- plier-dependent, but the supplier is biased to get you to spend money on upgrading your equipment, and then you don't really have Industry 4.0 because you blew your money on one or two pieces of equipment. What's better for the whole ecosystem is for board shops to have a process engineer- ing team that does these processes step by step. en you generate enough funding to do some significant investments that have a good NPV through the cash flows that emerge from these improvements. is is better for every- body. It's better for the suppliers and the board shops, and you have a more robust industry. To me, this is the best approach. In PCB shops, there aren't really any pro- cessing engineers; they're manufacturing engi- neers in just about all PCB shops. ey trou- bleshoot problems with parts, deal with down- time situations, and occasionally bring in a piece of equipment. Process engineering is implementing Industry 4.0, going ahead and making systems, collecting data, doing predic- tive studies, and doing this without the sup- plier as much as possible. If you're very reliant on the supplier, the sup- plier is running your factory in their interests, not in yours. You must always have a balance. Working with suppliers is great if you can stand on the same footing as they are. A dialogue, a dialectic, is the best opportunity to create value. But when the supplier is much more knowledgeable than you are about all these things, it turns into a zero-sum agreement, the supplier wins, and you get something, but you le a lot of value on the table. at's my assessment. It's about doing your own R&D. You just need a two-person engi- neering team; you get them set up with some subject matter experts in the factory and go process by process. In a few years you're fully Industry 4.0. Johnson: So, you have process by process and start collecting the data to put into the data- base. e first phase is collection. From there, you can start to track escapes, go back to find out what was going on in the processing of that particular part number that ended up being an escape, being a fault. I get that. But as you start moving, then what? Stepinski: en you can make very inexpensive changes to your procedures to address this, and you're going to use some money emerg- ing out of the factory system improvements for yourself to do further investments. Johnson: Right. As we're looking at phase one, how does that help in a practical sense to con- trol your input costs or your process costs? Stepinski: You must pareto your wastes. Where do you have the most waste? ere are many