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36 SMT Magazine • May 2016 due to their variety and constant change of products, they actually had to dial back some of their robot investment and use humans instead because they're much more flexible. It took too long to program the robots. I think that it's not a matter of having facto- ries with no people, but that some of the repeti- tive tasks that have to be precise every single time will be taken over by machines, and that frees humans up to do, hopefully, something that provides higher value. Las Marias: Do you agree that the reflow and the screen printing process have a lot of room for im- provement? Dahle: Yes, and I think early on in this indus- try, it was recognized that 60% of the defects were in the screen printing process. Since then, there's been a tremendous improvement in screen printers and they do a fantastic job. Reflow ovens have also, of course, become a lot more stable, a lot better controlled, with better flux management systems and so forth. But now, we're sort of in a revolution where we are looking at the utilization of the equip - ment. As I said, if the equipment is standing still because of change over or troubleshoot- ing or whatever, it doesn't help that it's the best on the market. Now we need to use infor- mation and process information to help these production lines run more efficiently, which means more up-time and find all the areas of downtime so we can influence and eliminate that. Las Marias: Does that mean you can also upgrade a legacy reflow oven with your technology? Dahle: Correct. It's almost limitless. We will retrofit on virtually every oven make, model and age. If you have a really old computer, pre- Windows XP, there might be need for a sepa- rate computer. I think you raise an interesting question, because as companies are looking to have a smarter factory, it's important that you can retrofit. To ask them to just throw away all their ex- isting equipment and buy all brand new is go- ing to be cost-prohibitive for most companies. We go in and make old ovens intelligent. Las Marias: Yes, I think this is also related to IoT. You mentioned that having all the equipment, it's going to be difficult to justify getting new ones just to have that smart factory. Dahle: Exactly. Obviously the new machines are better and they become more and more intelli- gent every year, so if you can afford it that would be fantastic. We work with a lot of oven manufac- turers, so our technology can be integrated into Making SYStEMS SMaRtER to gain viSibilitY, tRacEabilitY, and REducE Handling ERRoRS Figure 1: More and more companies now want transparency in their equipment processes.