Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1527276
60 SMT007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2024 and how automating this area can significantly enhance productivity, reduce costs, and ensure quality in electronics manufacturing. The Impact of Manual Materials Handling Manual materials handling remains a signif- icant bottleneck in many electronics manu- facturing facilities. In traditional setups, com- ponents are stored on shelves or in bins, with warehouse employees responsible for manu- ally retrieving and deploying them to the pro- duction line. is manual process leads to myr- iad issues. First, manual component kitting is one of the more labor-intensive areas of the facil- ity. Operators are tasked with manually mov- ing from location to location and retrieving one part at a time. For argument's sake, if an operator can pick a single part every minute (and that's being very aggressive), a smaller 60-piece kit would take at least an hour to pick. Now, multiply that across all the jobs and a manufacturer could be pulling in a sin- gle eight-hour shi. How many employees are dedicated to just pulling and returning materi- als? e time spent locating and moving mate- rials slows down the production process, sig- nificantly negating the benefits of advanced automation on the SMT line. Another common issue in manual picking is component misplacement. When reels are stored on shelves and tied to a manual loca- tion, it is entirely dependent upon the operator to ensure they're not only pulling the correct part, but also returning it to the correct loca- tion. It's human nature to make these mistakes, but they can easily compound, leading to line stoppages due to a single missing component. Worse yet, having the automated placement equipment placing the wrong component on multiple PCBs creates re-work havoc because it was incorrectly put in a kit by the manual picking operation. Manual handling oen leads to inventory inaccuracies as well. Without real-time track- ing and automated management, it's easy for inventory levels to become misaligned with actual stock. is can result in overstocking, which ties up valuable space and capital, or stock outages, which can halt production and lead to costly emergency ordering. Compo- nent visibility is critical, especially in a world where component availability leaves much to be desired. The Case for Materials Automation Investing in automated materials stor- age systems can address glaring inefficien- cies and transform the materials handling pro- cess. ere are several storage systems on the market that cater to electronics manufactur- ing, however, they can be grouped into three main technologies: Pick-to-light racks, ver- tical carousels, and fully automated storage towers. Each offers different levels of automa- tion and intelligence. Rather than spending the remaining balance of the article highlight- ing the differences between these systems, I " Manual materials handling remains a significant boleneck in many electronics manufacturing facilities. "