Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/942744
30 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2018 affect quality, cost, and for the manufacturer, margins. Matties: How do we determine what the most important feedback is for a designer? Who decides? Gorajia: Identifying the top-running manufac- turability issues over the last three years would be a target place to start. Start building trends, start building correlations based on that. There are analytics tools all over the place now. Then, start honing on what those are and analyze if there is a systemic problem or a people prob- lem. This is what we help organizations do. Matties: Because we're in a period where data is overwhelming; you can get paralyzed in data. Mentor has been working a lot on Indus- try 4.0 total factory communication. How does that all play in to what we're discussing here? Gorajia: Well, all this feedback can't happen unless we have it organized and structured in such a way where we're gleaning information out of all of this data. We know what parts and what defect rates there are in the previous example, right? We can tie that into a corre- lation that says, "Okay, this particular design organization, out of the five we work with, has a higher defect rate than these other ones. Why? What's the root cause of it? How do we whittle it down?" Now, with a lot of the algo- rithms out there, advanced neural networks, clustering and everything, we can actually start predicting trends and saying, "Okay, well in the last five years of data, this is how we've done. Now, let's see what course are we pro- jecting and how do we correct the course?" Matties: is there a standard language for all the processes to talk to each other? Gorajia: We would consult that problem, too. Matties: There seems to be a battle for that stuff. Gorajia: Yeah, but standards, as a topic, is fine to discuss. But standards don't solve business problems. A business problem says, "How much money am I going to save? How much more money am I going to make?" The typi- cal factory doesn't make a dollar unless there's a product coming out the other end. You can have the discussion about standards, and I'm not against that, but those are problems that can be solved. Communication standards is a methodology. It consists of data that should be meaningful, and a communication transport that all the constituent systems can understand and glean what they need to. As an industry, PCB assembly manufacturing is probably the worst at adopting standards. The Semiconduc- tor industry standardized. Many of the CNC machines now speak OPC UA (Unified Archi- tecture) and the like. Matties: Those are just arguments I hear and I agree with what you're saying. I think it's really insightful. Gorajia: You get down in these proverbial rat holes on discussions, but we're here to make business. Manufacturers need to produce and designers need to produce. Companies are here to make money by pushing specific products. These types of discussions shouldn't stop it. All of this is solvable. I'm sure in time we will have a standard. Mentor has published stan- dards as well. Shaughnessy: It sounds like you really see design as the first step of manufacturing. A lot of people don't really understand that. Okay, this particular design organization, out of the five we work with, has a higher defect rate than these other ones. Why? What's the root cause of it? How do we whittle it down?