Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/989774
JUNE 2018 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 31 into legacy formats intended for humans to process. Issues raised about product IP protec- tion are nonsense, as however the data is sent, the product data itself is eventually re-created by the manufacturing entity in a format that can easily be replicated. The core issue is that the use of legacy formats forces human intervention, which creates unnecessary cost, delay, and the likelihood of mistakes, all of which fundamentally affect the business performance of the product. Being an open standard, the use of the IPC-2581 digital prod - uct model is available as a standard single- click output from professional design systems. The design through manufacturing flow, that is the communication of the product model to manufacturing can therefore be done in seconds, rather than hours or even days. The next stage of the digital process is to utilize a digital manufacturing engineer- ing system that has knowledge of produc- tion configurations, that will apply the digital product model to a line configuration, auto- matically splitting out the data as required by each of the processes. Once again, the digital solution reduces work that once took hours or days into a few seconds. As this data assignment process can be done so quickly, the selection of a specific line configuration need not be fixed far in advance. The assign - ment of line and creation of the work-order can in fact be done very close to the start of production without risk. This means that there is the ability to have a choice of multi - ple line configurations, each of which can be assessed to decide which one meets the immediate customer need in the most effi- cient way. The best manufacturing engineer- ing systems therefore support assignment of product to line configuration "on demand." This enables real-world factory schedules and work-order assignments to be made just in time, such that immediate reaction can be made to changes in customer demand. This contrasts significantly with prior Industry 3.0 practices, where decisions had to be made at the shop-floor level many days or weeks in advance, with only crude and often ineffective simulation techniques for planning optimiza - tion. This new best practice of digitalization of the engineering data preparation process is therefore completely in line with the require- ments of Industry 4.0, and in fact without it, there is no chance that an Industry 4.0 opera- tion could practicably be sustained. DDD Best Practice Digital best practices, including the use of the digital product mode for both auto- mated machine processes to take place and the creation of paperless product documen- tation/work-instructions for non-automated processes, which will be covered in more detail later, means that everything required for manufacturing is created digitally, transferred digitally, and executed digitally. For those who remember the birth of digital music on CD, this is the sought after DDD format of music, where no analogue, or in this case human manipula- tion of the data has taken place. This is the first piece of our digital re-master- ing of MES, where new best practices are devel- oping. As a summary of the digital best prac- tice flow for preparation of data for automated processes: 1. Digital Design Process a. A digital product model is created by the design system in IPC-2581 format, including both the electrical and mechanical design features. b. Where supply-chain data is managed centrally (in a multi-site organization with centralized PLM for example), the production BOM is applied to the IPC-2581 file directly before it reaches manufacturing 2. Digital Manufacturing Engineering System a. The single IPC-2581 digital product model file is received into manufacturing b. Where supply-chain data is managed locally by ERP, the BOM data is merged, on receipt of a single digital file c. The manufacturing engineering tool identifies capable line configurations, which are communicated to the digital production planning system