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28 SMT Magazine • March 2017 that a single model in black should be all that we would need. Many choices for any particular product also is common now in electronics, such as a smart- phone or tablet. We carry these personal pref- erences with us wherever we go, including into our working lives. Ideas that successfully differ- entiate one operation against another create an immense amount of satisfaction. The need from humans for more personalized electronic prod- ucts has led to an increasing number of product variations. Also, where once we saw electron- ics as a stand-alone industry, it is now a critical part of every other industry. As microelectron- ics move further into different aspects of our lives, new applications of electronics continue to add to the variation which, in some areas, ap- pears to be increasing exponentially. Intuition, innovation, ideas, and initia- tive—all of these words starting with "I" charac- terize qualities that we look for in engineers and managers. The simple fact that there is more than one factory in the world creates compet- itiveness. Humans are flexible, able to define and create factories that are appropriate for the product profiles that are being created, and for the human customers that they serve. Following this chain of flexibility, electron- ics assembly factories have to be flexible to cope with the many different products and variants and to respond to changes in customer delivery demands in the short-term, perhaps even daily in a perfect Industry 4.0 world. This is contrary, however, to the concept and nature of mass pro- duction. Because of mass production and asso- ciated economies of scale, we have been able to enjoy affordable products of any type. Now, it seems as though we are being pushed backward to the days when most goods were made on a bespoke basis. In this fast-moving, progressive, throw-away culture, the reality is that this is not practical. These are all the causes of the so- called revolution in manufacturing, and the so- lution is Industry 4.0. Smart Industry 4.0 facto- ries have to be making products on a demand- driven basis but also need to operate in a mass production mode, albeit in a flexible way. This near impossible task cannot be managed by hu- mans, so Industry 4.0 requires us to use com- puterization to take over the operational deci- sion-making, to guide the products with their associated resources and dependencies dynami- cally, in real time. Computerization Without Knowledge We often hear the comment that there are "too many" providers of SMT and related equip- ment on the market, often citing lack of growth in the number of "shipped PCBs" or even an overall decline in recent years. This decline is a debatable measurement. I suspect that it comes from data at the PCB fabrication stage; however, it is never really explained. One modern fabri- cated PCB panel is normally split into a number of smaller PCB boards, just one of which is nor- mally needed per finished product. The number of boards derived from each panel has increased rapidly in recent years as feature and materials sizes have diminished. But if you take a look around yourself right now, you can see that the electronics indus- try is not shrinking; instead, there is growth in new applications for electronics. The simple "shipped PCBs" statistic hides a great deal of the detail, of that I am sure. It is like looking out the window to see what the weather is really like versus trusting the generalized weather report on TV, true especially here in the U.K. Such cal- culations and computerizations lack the accu- racy, detail, and timeliness of hard data. Rather than using a purely market financial approach and saying that there are too many providers of equipment; if you take a real look at electron- ics manufacturing technology, you will see the ONE SIZE FITS ALL? " Humans are flexible, able to define and create factories that are appropriate for the product profiles that are being created, and for the human customers that they serve. "