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July 2016 • SMT Magazine 33 INDUSTRY 4.0: MAKING THE FIRST MOVE The Machine Vendor Environment The issues around the so-called standards of the industry seem like an investment too large to justify for many other companies, perhaps suited to those larger companies who could af- ford to pioneer. As events unfolded, machine vendors realized that customer demand for ma- chine-communications-based functionality was growing, without a clear solution. This initially brought unwelcome pressure on the machine vendors to supply data to customers in a myri- ad of different formats. The larger machine ven- dors have been able to turn this into a revenue opportunity. The proposal of their proprietary standard by the machine vendors to their cus- tomer sounds attractive, with so much informa- tion and control available, including now many Industry 4.0 and smart factory functions. The benefits from such things as closed-loop process adjustment, adaptive test, predictive mainte- nance, and material management, all based on live machine events is compelling, with real de- monstrable benefits. The cost of the solution is simple to understand and maintain. However, the downsides are that the adop- tion of the solution establishes a dependent re- lationship between the customer and the ma- chine vendor and that the solution is unlikely to ever be expandable beyond the machine do- main. Material management, for example, may only apply to the kitting or preparation area of materials for the SMT machines, rather than complete materials for the factory, and exclude materials for mounting or assembly operations, as well as repair, of which need to be managed preferably with just one site-wide standard op- eration. Extending the machine-vendor-driven solution to cover or integrate into other facto- ry operations and systems is difficult and may never be addressed. Middleware Rather than working directly with one or more machine vendors' proprietary standards, the use of "middleware" may help to fill the gap between higher level manufacturing systems and machines on the shop-floor. The middle- ware package is likely to be a productized piece of an established piece of software from a solu- tion provider so that a reasonable range of ma- chines are supported. Extending the support of machines to those not currently supported may be an issue. The degree of data standardization and completeness also would be an issue because the structure would be orientated and limited to the original intention for the use of the data, making it difficult in many scenarios for full sys- tem integration. With the dependency on a sin- gle provider for all machine interfaces and sup- port, the established manufacturing execution systems (MES) solution might be more practical. An Established MES Solution For those companies who look for a com- plete factory solution, ironically they have to compromise on specific machine connectiv- ity. Few, if any, generic MES solutions are able to directly acquire machine data and interpret events into meaningful information. The real cost of MES, the addition of many manual op- erations for data collection, is a bottleneck to smart factory solutions. Several companies now provide better linkage to machines such as the most popular SMT placers, but they are still an extension of a generic interface that is not suf- ficient to capture the true nature of events or be able to piece together the detail of the events that occur. For simple use, this is not too much of a problem, but far from the goal of providing the kind of functionality that a true Industry 4.0 or smart factory is really about. The generic MES solution is weak where the majority of ma- terials are assembled. " Few, if any, generic MES solutions are able to directly acquire machine data and interpret events into meaningful information. The real cost of MES, the addition of many manual operations for data collection, is a bottleneck to smart factory solutions. "