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JULY 2026 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 39 sequence is not as crucial as before. Reorganizing roles to create specialists for a specific part of the setup process means that each specialist can prepare multiple jobs ahead of time. It's a bit of Henry Ford's assembly line thinking applied to the EMS environment. For example, a team might be assembled as: This creates a parallel workflow even if each indi- vidual job must be run in a specific sequence. Each team member is working on one of the jobs in the queue; up to four jobs are being prepared simulta- neously under this structure. In this example, two months are set aside for a deep dive into creating and training parallel work- flows. A typical performance gain might be 10 minutes, representing about 9% of the original 105 minutes, and bringing the optimized setup time after five phases down to 30 minutes, which translates to about $400,000 in annualized additional capacity. Phase 6: First Article Optimization Finally, spend about two months tackling engi- neering bottlenecks. If your first article process looks like this: 1. Build first board 2. Wait 3. Engineer arrives 4. Inspection begins 5. Corrections made Then it's time to shake up the first article proce- dures. While this hurry-up-and-wait methodology only costs about 15 minutes of time, to optimize, move as much as possible into a pre-verification methodology of program simulation, feeder valida- tion, and AOI recipe verification. Ultimately, evolve your physical first article accep- tance process into a digital first article checklist, and first article moves from 15 to five minutes. The return on investment here is about 4%, representing approximately $175,000 in added capacity. Setup's New Normal Every EMS company is its own unique microcosm. You might find your specific optimization results to be different, or perhaps you identify other optimiza- tions not mentioned here in this example. Still, using the reasonable estimations in the six phases, the newly optimized setup flow looks like Table 4. The Net Return By recovering 320 minutes per day for use in revenue generation, this EMS company likely added more customers without requiring additional capital outlay. Perhaps this extra capacity allowed for equipment upgrades and/or employee compen- sation that extend capabilities and improve experi- enced employee retention. Of course, every company is unique. Your specific challenges may be somewhat different than this hypo- thetical example. Nevertheless, using this thought experiment as inspiration, chances are good you can find new areas for improvement. After all, even the top EMS companies are still optimizing. That's why it's called "continuous improvement." SMT007 TEAM MEMBER RESPONSIBILITY Operator A Machine prep Operator B Feeder carts Material Handler Component staging Technician Program verification Table 4: Typical changeover timeline ACTIVITY DURATION (IN MINUTES) Cart swap 5 Program load 2 Validation scan 3 Tooling change 5 First article 5 Buffer 5 Total 25