Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1508761
34 SMT007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2023 ensure we don't have that problem when it gets placed on the board. Johnson: That's where your digital factory starts. Vora: at's right. How is any material handled as soon is it's walked in the door? How did it get labeled? Is there a verification aer the label- ing process? Even in the soware we're look- ing at right now, there is a process to measure the part before it can have an approval with a unique ID in the system. Carlson: One of our fears with AOI is false escapes; we're thinking things are fine, but some- thing is wrong when it gets to the customer. Vora: Sometimes the BOM from the customer is wrong. We programmed our AOI and the whole process to that BOM; getting the docu- mentation correct saves us from thinking we're right vs. not being right. Matties: Inspection starts at the data level. Vora: With our current soware, we have internal part numbers per customer; all parts are segregated by customer, so we don't share parts anymore. at was a decision we made to better manage the inventory. We built soware for use during the BOM introduction; it compares that BOM against all the parts we already have in our system and does any matching proactively. Every time an existing customer introduces a BOM, only 10–30% of the parts are new. We do a lot of that work up front. We've created a few different pieces of so- ware to help in that early entry phase. It helps because we can do that work at an expedited rate with added quality assurance. Johnson: When a company like VAS must write its own software, it's usually because there's a functionality gap in the software from vendors that forces you to roll your own. Where are you finding gaps in the software? Vora: Our MES search is leading us to find that about 85% of what we want is possible. Granted, it's not what we originally thought we wanted; we assumed the world was much Inventory Management System at VAS.