Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/634491
78 SMT Magazine • February 2016 ment and all the other things we get from the corporate side. Matties: From the Valor side, obviously you've been affiliated with Mentor for many years. What sort of changes have you seen recently, from your perspective, and what are the real shifts going on there? Hoz: One of the most recent changes is Industry 4.0. Its six design principles are perfectly aligned with the way we developed our solutions quite a while ago because of business needs that came from our customers. As such, we are a company that can really deliver solutions for Industry 4.0. I'm not just talking about technical solutions, but also at the business level starting from de- sign all the way down to manufacturing. If it's okay with you, I want to show you and walk you through a short presentation. We are talking about the design for smart factories of the future, and basically the need or the driver in the market is of course to ad- dress increased level of complexity and custom- ization, shorten product lifecycle and increase process globalization. This is about designing in one place and manufacturing in the same place versus designing everywhere and building anywhere. The six principles I mentioned are connectivity, decentralization, human-machine interactions, virtualization, modularity and re- al-time capability. If we talk about connectivity, this is the ability of all the players to connect via the internet of things—I'm talking about humans, machines and factories. Decentraliza- tion is also important. Matties: That's probably the largest area. Hoz: You're right. This is the ability of systems to make decisions on their own and this is what we call a "single machine factory." Now, we look at the solutions to support the needs of the six principles. We start with the NPI—a very early stage in the design flow. Taking the design, going down through the machine pro- gramming to understand which machines you want to use. You schedule it and then you start manufacturing it. There's process preparation where you do the machine programming, the documentation, and production portability, which is extremely important for this industry 4.0., which is just about software. Industry 3.0 was about hardware. Matties: It's about software and data. Hoz: It's about the data—where you can collect the data and then how you normalize the data, so everyone can speak the same language. Lavi Ben David: In that aspect, I think we are also in a very good position because over the years we have had machine vendors where ev- eryone comes in with their own proprietary in- terface. What we were doing on the shop floor was connecting and cooperating with those big providers to connect and communicate with their machines and overcome this challenge of a big environment with many protocols, many languages and different capabilities from the machines that are a separate ecosystem in the factory. We are coming to them with our abil- ity to connect those machines and then provide a single, universal communication protocol for these interfaces. I think although we are not an equipment or hardware provider, with our ca- pabilities to connect to the different machines on the shop floor we are in a position to provide this universal Industry 4.0 visibility. Matties: It sounds like you're coming in as a pack- age or a total solution, from design to completed product. " this is about designing in one place and manufacturing in the same place versus designing everywhere and building anywhere. " iNdustrY 4.0: creatiNg a staNdard