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34 SMT Magazine • April 2016 job manageable, for example, a preset decision of which line is to be used for each product. With today's modern process preparation system, however, the capabilities of all machines are modeled in software. This enables the soft- ware to automatically and accurately distribute the placement workload over any line configu- ration made up of any machines from any ven- dor. Whether a product is run on line A or line B should be based on using the best machine for the job, not limited to which machines include required library data or not. With the Valor Pro- cess Preparation software, several line configura- tions can be modeled to find the best machines for the job. The engineering time required to perform mindless repetitive duplicated manual operations can now be refocused to make real improvements in shop-floor productivity. There is always a large overlap in SMT ma- chine capabilities, meaning that most parts can be placed on a choice of machines in the line. This is where program optimization and line bal- ancing come in. Of course, within a single ma- chine vendor's platform, there will be software provided with the machine to do this. In these cases, it can be just a matter of sending the fully prepared data to the machine vendor's software, including the details of the shape library. One key element to do this is the automated rule-based generation of what would normally be handmade settings for the components to run on the machines. These settings are the personal parts settings, for example, lighting, camera, nozzle, things which are related to the treatment of specific types and shapes of ma- terial on the specific machines. These can be worked out automatically by the Valor unique automated-generation function that generates these parameters based on defined engineering rules. This leads to consistency and accuracy, even taking care of new parts automatically as they are introduced. When there are mixed platforms in the line, including the case of different platforms from the same vendor, some very significant engi- neering work is required for line balancing. First, the data has to be prepared into multiple formats. After each piece of the vendor's soft- ware has done its work, the estimated working times of each machine may be quite different. Parts assignment will need to be moved manu- ally from machine to machine and the opti- mization repeated, often several times, until a good balance is achieved. Figure 8: The ability for a process preparation solution to facilitate easy line or site transfer is key to efficiency and productivity. bEsT-PracTicE ProcEss PrEParaTion for Pcb assEmblY