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November 2017 • SMT Magazine 85 electronics assembly. You go to sem- inars, presentations, conferences, and they all talk about disruption, digitization, big data, and nothing really specific. We've been doing a lot of applications already related to Industry 4.0 for our customers. I wanted to go and present something that will get people's attention and maybe inspire someone to do some- thing real even if that means prov- ing I was wrong. The ultimate goal of Industry 4.0 is a lights-out factory that can run unattended for extended peri- ods of time. That will give us max- imum throughput, save the cost of the labor and energy, and we can better meet customer expectations because there aren't interruptions. That's the final goal. Well, let's then go backwards. How do we get to that point? In my paper, I discuss the technologies you need to use, how all that should be designed, and the current technolo- gies that can support that. Because, I think that we can now create lights-out assembly lines, but only for a specific type of components or ma- chines that can place smaller components. We can now design, for example, a lights-out line for sensor manufacturing. You can't do that for every type of board or component placements because the machine designs don't support that yet. In the paper, I discussed the steps the indus- try needs to take to achieve the goal. My goal was not only to present the paper, but also to summarize my thinking, to put it on paper and share with people, but also to have that as a blueprint for my company. And we're now fol- lowing my paper, pretty much, and developing these things with our customers. Las Marias: The goal is to have a totally un- manned factory? Vujosevic: That's going to happen and I know some big companies that are making plans to do that. We know that's going to happen and I'm not, in my paper, talking about any social implications of that, you know, people are go- ing to lose jobs. But that's going to happen no matter what, whether we talk or not. We need to talk about it and prepare people to start train- ing for high tech jobs especially younger gen- erations. You can't hide behind lies that there's not going to be a loss of jobs. It will happen. Operator-free plants will happen soon. Las Marias: What are the challenges that will be faced by the industry? Vujosevic: The challenges are making more in- telligent equipment designs and standard ma- chine to machine interfaces. Machines don't support operator-free processes right now. The pick and place machines cannot be operator- free because you have to put reel on a feeder, and you have to put the feeder into the slot. A robot cannot do that right now. So, we need to eliminate tapes and feeders, and a different de- sign needs to be in place. That's one challenge. Machines need to be re-designed. The second challenge is the communica- tions between machines—we need better proto- cols. They are developing several protocols right now, but everyone has some business interest in the whole process and we are going to end up again with a number of protocols and vendors supporting different protocols. Somehow we will be able to have machines talk to each oth- er, but it's not going to be as simple as people OPTIMAL ELECTRONICS SETS SIGHT ON GROWTH Figure 2: Optimal's focus is on mobile solutions plant-wide.