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September 2014 • SMT Magazine 23 figure 8: Problem board and components. ductivity increase, quality increase, and costs were contained to the cost of the robot and the feeders. Case Study 3 A customer had a process where a very large metal jig needed to be attached to the PCB. Ac- curate placement of this jig was critical. Based on the size of this jig, the customer assumed that it needed to be manually processed by a human, and suffered slow production and poor quality results. A proposal for an accurate robot capable of handling this large size jig and com- municating with the SMT line was submitted. The resulting solution was a robot being placed in the SMT line that accurately placed the large jig with a human only needing to supply the jigs to the robot in quantity. The customer saw that automation of this process was not only possible but resulted in higher productivity and higher quality for the product. A side benefit was later realized that the robot was also capa- ble of placing SMT components and could help speed up other production needs. A rObOt'S pLACe IN Smt continues feATure