Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/634491
February 2016 • SMT Magazine 83 is a very significant level. Now you can argue, 'Okay, what's the ROI for that?' Usually, with our prod- uct there, the ROI is less than six months. They already advance all of their investment based on their saving of materials alone. It's not only just on the arrivals of materials, but it's also on mak- ing sure the right materials go to the right place, because sometimes there could be leftover materials— materials not used on the next line but can be used in manufacturing. We're really optimizing the mate- rials and material ordering all the way through the manufacturing site. It was huge savings for our customer that was using robots to collect leftover materials and put huge piles of materials on the shop floor. Now it's all clean and he just sends the robots to resupply to the machine. Hoz: Just to give you an example, if you have a reel with 1,000 components and you want them on one work order. Let's say you consume 700, what do you do with the rest? Do you put it back in the warehouse? First of all, once it has left the warehouse, the ERP system has an open bal- ance. Now it turns into a work in progress and you cannot go back. You can go down to the fin- ished goods, but you can't go back. The 300 will probably stay there on the line. If they are lucky and there's another order they'll find something to do with it. If not, it will just be next to the machine in the trolley and then you will see it will add up. We eliminate this problem. Matties: If you need 700, then 700 will show up and not 1,000. Hoz: Exactly, and if you do have 1,000, we'll take care of the 300. We know in the pro- duction plan to use the next work order that will consume these 300 components and not others. Matties: With the Industry 4.0 smart factory, there's a new kind of workforce that needs to emerge. It's not going to be the same kind of employee we've hired in the past. It's going to be somebody that might be more computer oriented, etc. How do you see it? Hoz: To some extent they will be more com- puter oriented, but on the other hand we're going to make it very simple. You just connect it and it will work. Maybe at the engineering level there will be some people that will be more responsible. But it's not just about need- ing smarter people. We need people that will be more responsible because now they can extend the responsibility not just over one line, but it could be over a factory or even multiple fac- tories. We can virtualize the manufacturing in Brazil from where I'm sitting now in China. It's giving them more responsibility, but they don't necessarily need a higher IQ. Lavi Ben David: We see also in China a lot of manufacturers, whether they are local or whether they are international, adapting those technologies and adapting to our software and using it for Industry 4.0 implementation. Hoz: The nice thing about our solution is that we don't need to change everything that's al- ready in place. It shouldn't be an ERP system, in terms of the amount of implementation time that you have to put in or that you have to in- iNdustrY 4.0: creatiNg a staNdard Mentor Graphics Valor Division's Ofer Lavi Ben David and Dan Hoz.