Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/634491
February 2016 • SMT Magazine 79 Hoz: If you look around through software pro- viders that might have an Industry 4.0 solution, most will only talk to you about the manufactur- ing, per se. We are taking it a few stages earlier, from design. That's the advantage and this is what we call the left shift concept—every time you can identify something at an earlier stage, it will prob- ably save you 10 times the amount it would cost to repair an error detected at later stage. Yesterday, there was a very nice NES panel discussion here. There were six people talking from different companies and the last question was, "I work through so many processes and so many machine vendors in so many spaces. Ev- eryone speaks different language. Can we have a standard language for everything like in other spaces, like the semiconductor spaces?" In the past, we used a format called ODB ++. That's a very elegant way of saying "getting the data." We came up with that. Now we are going to do the same for manufacturing. It's going to be a standard language for everyone that will enable them to get the data, collect the data, normalize it and share it between the different machines. Matties: And the machines can be connected uni- versally? And when I say universally, I don't mean from machine to machine in one factory, but across the globe—like being able to have my machine in Brazil talk to my machine in London. Hoz: Without naming names, a customer of ours in Brazil that runs some programming for his product said, 'Okay, I want to use this pro- gramming now in China, how do I do that?' We sent his manufacturing data package over to China and they got the programming, the set of instructions, and everything was documented. They went to the lines and programmed it and then started to manufacture the product. Matties: This is part of the human machine inter- action, and the idea is that we're really limiting that with 4.0, right? There's still an interaction, but it's reduced. Hoz: Yes. We do see it happening and every- thing will be automated. I think that we'll get more people or customers that say, "Okay, what about my job?" Matties: What do you say to that? Hoz: Everything is going to be automated, that's why we come in. We will be able to take you to the next level, to do something smarter that will challenge you but give you the opportunity to contribute more. Matties: In some cases, the reality is those jobs might go away. That's just the reality, because we're reducing our labor by bringing in smarter systems. Hoz: It's about lifestyle. We want to have a bet- ter lifestyle. We want to do things much easier than what we do today. We want to use a system to connect everything to each other. We will enable that. This will become much cheaper to buy, so maybe even the blue collar guy that works in the factory level, in order to buy this device, he has to work something like a month. Now, he will be able to work only two weeks, in order to get this device. Matties: There's a benefit. I'm not arguing with that. The Whelen factory that just came in Ameri- ca, in New Hampshire, was spending $7 million a year on circuit boards in China, and for $12 million they set up a facility that is completely automated. That factory normally, without that automation and 4.0, would have been maybe 80–100 people, and they're doing it with 17. Hoz: Two weeks ago I was in China and I visited different customers there. They're all talking about Industry 4.0, or as they call it IT2. They were talking about automating everything, computerizing everything and they were saying that in 10 years, instead of people going on the lines there, it will be robots that make it faster. Matties: Because they realized that labor rates were their competitive advantage, but that's gone. Down in Dongguan, and those areas, in some cases the government is coming in and saying, "You can't hire people. You have to auto- mate." They say it's because they don't want more traffic on the roads, but what they don't want to do is lose the industry to India or Vietnam or somewhere else. iNdustrY 4.0: creatiNg a staNdard