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86 SMT Magazine • September 2017 data collection time, waiting for external sign- offs, essentially any time spent by direct labor that is not spent working directly applying val- ue added activity to an open sales or work order. At first glance, you may consider this to be insignificant but the accumulative effect of all this time can be substantial. By tracking this time or shedding light on all this kind of activ- ity it also assists internal efforts to reduce these times and return more productive labor time to the shop floor to work on product. Set-up reduc- tion activities, staging material and automating data collection and continuous flow models can all improve these situations. My suggestions for improving queue times would of course be to start by collecting all the time associated with these functions. Consid- er this as a baseline measurement that can be used as a jumping off or starting point. Track improvements in each of these areas over peri- odic intervals to highlight reductions. The in- verse of this time saved should directly correlate to increased capacity. 9. Management support for implementing the tool is given and there is a champion for the project. Most projects that have any hope of last- ing and being implemented properly are those that have a specific champion or project man- ager as well as the support from senior man- agement. With the proper support, the appro- priate number of resources may get applied and the appropriate time allocated to the proj- ect to see it through to completion and full implementation. A successful CP model should be part of the organization's sales and operations plan- ning (S&OP) system. In this process, the exec- utive leadership continuously review, plan and allocate the resources of all functions to meet a revenue and financial goal. Without a cohesive planning approach across all functional leaders of the organization, any isolated CP process will have only limited impact. The S&OP process is a topic by itself so we recommend you further in - vestigate the topic and benchmark from compa- nies successfully running an S&OP process. We will expand about S&OP in a later article. SMT This article was written in collaboration with Richard Kelly, vice president of supply chain, and Luis Ramirez, COO, of MC Assembly. David Prunier is the vice president of new business development at MC Assembly. IMPLEMENTING A CAPACITY PLANNING TOOL The color of the light emitted by an LED can be tuned by altering the size of their semiconductor crystals. LMU researchers have found a clever and economical way of doing just that, which lends it- self to industrial-scale production. LMU researchers, in collaboration with col- leagues at the University of Linz (Austria), have developed a method for the production of semi-conducting nano- crystals based on perovskite. These crystals are extreme- ly stable, which ensures that the LEDs exhibit high color fi- delity. Moreover, the resulting Red, Green, Yellow, Blue semiconductors can be printed on suitable surfac- es, and are thus predestined for the manufacture of LEDs for use in displays. The crucial element in the new method is a thin wafer, only a few nanometers thick, which is patterned like a waffle. The depressions serve as tiny reaction vessels, whose shape and volume ultimate- ly determine the final size of the nanocrystals. Moreover, the wafers are produced by means of an economical elec- trochemical process, and can be fashioned directly into LEDs.