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22 SMT Magazine • January 2017 All of the recent innovations in electronics manufacturing, including Industry 4.0, the In- ternet of Manufacturing, smart factories, digital manufacturing, etc., bring digitization to many aspects of the factory operation. The names don't really matter, as most people's under- standing of what these initiatives are continues to differ. However, concerns with implement- ing these innovations include the compatibility of information transfer, as we discussed in Part 1 of this series, as well as actual Smart applica- tion examples as we saw in Part 2, and the need for an open platform of information, which is being enabled by such technologies as the open manufacturing language (OML). Digital data capture presents another oppor- tunity for innovation—the complete traceabili- ty of the operation. Now, at last, traceability for electronics is defined by a dedicated standard in IPC-1782, which is designed to bring the appro- priate levels of traceability without any net cost to the operation, that is, in a smart way. Traceability is like having a CCTV camera that watches the manufacturing operation and records everything that happens. If a defect is detected in any aspect of production, the re- cording can be played back as if in slow mo- tion to identify exactly what happened. The camera can see many different things happen- ing because it has a point of view that includes the whole factory operation. Total traceability is not driven from a single point of view, such as the data from an SMT machine. The advantage of complete traceability is the ability to gather big data, that is, data from all of the different as- pects of manufacturing, in such a way that in- formation can be analyzed to understand the interaction of the different processes, events, and actions that are happening in the factory. For example, we can watch the SMT place- ment machine. Our camera can see the place- ment of components onto the PCB. While this happens, the SMT machine provides a data re- cord of these placements as the machine fol- lows the engineering information that it was given. However, the data output is founded on the association of feeder position that the ma- terial was taken from for each individual placed by Michael Ford MENTOR GRAPHICS CORPORATION Smart for Smart's Sake, Part 3: Unification & Traceability THE ESSENTIAL PIONEER'S SURVIVAL GUIDE