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80 SMT Magazine • October 2017 by Stephen Las Marias I-CONNECT007 In an interview with SMT Magazine, Sven Patrik Eriksson, global technical director of Mentor, a Siemens Business, discusses the criti- cal challenges in getting meaningful, actionable data from the factory floor. He also talks about the manufacturers' journey to Industry 4.0, and the best approach towards its adoption. Stephen Las Marias: During the past couple of years, there's been much hype, which I think now is already becoming popular, around the Industry 4.0 trend. Do you think the electronics assembly industry is ready for that environment? Sven Patrik Eriksson: Valor has had products that do Industry 4.0 processes for a long time. For us, this is very exciting because it is about creating so- lutions using software within the factory. There's a lot of messaging at these exhibitions that you need a lot of new equipment to be able to do this. We think that with our technology, you can bring your current factory towards an Industry 4.0 envi- ronment. Las Marias: During the past couple of years, there's been much hype, which I think now is already becoming popular, around the Industry 4.0 trend. Do you think the electronics assem- bly industry is ready for that environment? Eriksson: Valor has had products that do Indus- try 4.0 processes for a long time. For us, this is very exciting because it is about creating solu- tions using software within the factory. There's a lot of messaging at these exhibitions that you need a lot of new equipment to be able to do this. We think that with our technology, you can bring your current factory towards an In- dustry 4.0 environment. Las Marias: What do you think are the critical challenges towards Industry 4.0 adoption? Eriksson: The big challenge is collecting data. You need to be able to collect data from all the different process stages within your factory, and that is a challenge. Some machines cannot pro- duce any outputs from the system. Others have a very advanced and enriched data that they can export to other control systems. So, it's this blend INTERVIEW