Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/924542
28 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2018 Stage 3: Analyze Once we had our key supplier partners se- lected, we sat down with them and began dis- cussing the specifics of the project. Only at this point did we begin to discuss details and intro- duce our own IP to the proj- ect under controlled condi- tions. Our IP was associated with having already devel- oped the world's first green smart factory [1] for captive work. The challenge now was to do the same thing ec- onomically in a shop that would service the merchant market with more conven- tional processes (i.e., dry film, electroless copper, OSP, etc.) compared to our previous captive operation. The good news was that our chosen suppliers were very excited by our project approach and had a tremendous amount of good ideas to both automate and make green even the most high-tech processes in the world market. Stage 4: Design The design phase was the most time-con- suming part of the project and required hun- dreds of hours of face-to-face discussions— mostly at supplier sites overseas—between our own engineering team, and our suppliers' technical departments. This was done to sort out the details of the tool designs we would procure, to ensure that we engineered out any risk, and to maximize the design perfor- mance. This phase yielded the greatest number of positive surprises since we spent so much time together with our partners, and could com- bine the experience of some of the most talent- ed engineers in our industry on a worldwide scale. For instance, the automation level we have now targeted is at half the labor level we originally estimated, and the wastewater bal- ancing we did within the wet process equip- ment has resulted in no waste rinse-water ever leaving the actual wet process lines, while re- ducing chemical cost by over 50% through en- gineering of balanced systems with full drag- out recovery built in. We were also able to design the world's first full traceability system for PCB fab production, Atotech thin core flex electroless and flash plate line under construction in Germany. AWP Group's zero-liquid discharge, single-piece flow DES line under construction in Poland.