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18 SMT Magazine • August 2016 and, how many times have they occurred in the past? What were the remedial actions and were they successful? Previously archived laboratory reports hold the key to such questions. Satisfactory reporting is costly in terms of cap- ital equipment and trained staff, whether they be electronics engineers, chemists or metallurgists. Michael Ford Senior Marketing Development Manager MENTOR GRAPHICS CORPORA- TION VALOR DIVISION What an extreme amount of time, effort, and money has been spent over the years on shop-floor communication, only to find that real value from the data remains elusive, of limited value, and, in some cases, completely useless. The communication revolution is now knocking at the door of the electronics indus - try, with such innovations as Industry 4.0 and smart factories, powered by the "Internet of Manufacturing." This is not just a fad or series of buzzwords. Some real values are to be ob- tained by having accurate and timely informa- tion from manufacturing machines, processes, and operations. Until now, however, everybody has been doing their own thing. Machine ven- dors with proprietary interfaces locking cus- tomers into a single equipment source, solution providers having to reinvent interfaces with ev- ery change of machine model or even version, and end-users having to do it themselves as they realize that they are the only people in the industry to have a real influence on machine vendors. This huge mess has caused such a lot of waste and lost opportunity. It is clearly time to stop and break this bad habit. Shop-floor communication know-how and technology for both hardware and software is now at a stage whereby fluid communication on the shop-floor is feasible. The collective ac - cumulation of said know-how in the industry is at such a stage as to allow a realistic defini- tion of how added-value communication can be done, without having to compromise down to the lowest common denominator or by leav- ing the content to be defined by individual negotiation on a case-by-case basis. It is time to bring in a new regime, a new standard, a new specification for data acquisition and flow across the shop-floor. The introduction of the Open Manufactur- ing Language (OML) captures these needs into a single specification that is free and open to use. The next step is to use OML to quickly, if not immediately, establish a standard for the indus- try driven by a recognized industry body such as the IPC. Rather than taking years to come up with and agree on a specification, let's take OML as a starting point and get this done in weeks rather than years. We have all been wait- ing for it; so let's all be a part of it. Why is traceability still perceived as a burden? We should be seeing this as a great opportunity… Those old enough to remember the "old days" of traceability will recall how much ef- fort it took to record key items of data about production completion, test results, and mate- rial usage, mostly on paper, to be filed away until needed. We hoped the data wouldn't be needed, that is, only if there was a catastrophe such as the need for a product recall. These old days are actually still today for most companies in the industry, and I suspect that everyone reading this is old enough to remember. Today, compliance and conformance dictate the need for traceability, often with just a broad, almost casual, reference. That there has never been a real definition of traceability for the electron - ics industry is almost unbelievable. Virtually every single adoption of traceability is differ- ent from every other, having been negotiated case-by-case. No one wants to spend time and resources to record data that is not necessary. Nobody wants to be in a position, however, where they are faced with huge costs of poor quality without a way to establish the scope of the issue and, hence, to reduce the cost and effect. The new days of traceability can start to hap- pen now. IPC will introduce the first traceability standard specifically focused on the electronics industry. With this new standard, defined lev- VOICES OF THE INDUSTRY X