Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/674146
May 2016 • SMT Magazine 37 a brand new oven as well. If you look at the tril- lions of dollars invested in factories around the world, I think it's a requirement that most of this new intelligence and the value it drives to cus- tomers can be retrofitted on existing equipment. Las Marias: One of our surveys for the upcoming issue of our magazine is about reducing handling errors. From your perspective, what strategies can you think of to help assembly companies deal with this issue? Dahle: The way I look at it, human beings are wonderful things. We have many talents, but one of them is not consistency, right? We're not a robot; we don't do the same thing over and over again. We forget things. One of the ele- ments in reducing operator error or human error is to make the product basically tell the machines what to do. An incoming product has a barcode that's being scanned, and we can verify that the right program in the oven matches that barcode. If not, we stop the product from entering the machine and we can download, automatically, the correct program. If we do detect some issue in the oven, we can also alert the MES system or they can alert the AOI machine to stop their ma - chine because we've just identified some suspect boards that need special attention. All of this is done by sensors being read without the human intervention. We don't re- quire them to remember to take corrective ac- tions; it's done for them in all these cases. Las Marias: Can you talk about the future technol- ogy trends that you expect to see in reflow ovens? Dahle: I think that historically, the focus has been on the oven, the machine. More and more now, if you want progress, you need to not just sub-optimize on the oven, you need to optimize the whole production line. Then you need to go beyond that and optimize all of the produc- tion lines. For example, scheduling. Typically, what happens in a factory today is that they de- cide one day to build a family of boards, which is dependent on how the pick-and-place ma- chine operates. But if they were running, let's say, three boards in a day, the pick-and-place machine says this is board A, B, and C, but we may say if you run it in a sequence and you start with C, then A and then B, you're going to minimize the changeover time in the oven. You start having communication between indi- vidual ovens in terms of optimizing an entire production line. Then, you can now do that same thing across different production lines. I think most manu- facturers now have developed their own MES systems, and the rest purchase excellent MEs systems from companies such as Aegis, Mentor Graphics and Itac. I think they are serving an increasingly important role, where we not only get machine data from the various ovens, but also provide the process data. Las Marias: For smaller assemblers, it's going to be a big investment on their part. Do you see any challenges on this? Dahle: Yes, there's always competition on price. We have tens of thousands of automatic sys- tems out there. Most of them are sort of the full-scale products, but there are some com- panies that want a more limited functionality and at a lower budget. We have a more modular product where you can just pick and choose the capabilities you're interested in at a much lower price point. There are a couple areas where we can make some significant improvements. One is, as I mentioned, basically all but eliminating change over time. The other one is troubleshooting. If a production line is running day in and day out, and then all of a sudden one day there's a yield issue identified. The last four boards are all de - fective, for example. They shut down the whole line, and now they try to identify the cause of Making SYStEMS SMaRtER to gain viSibilitY, tRacEabilitY, and REducE Handling ERRoRS " we can make some significant improvements in a couple of areas. "