What You Need to Know About the Digital Factory

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

Barry Matties spoke with Oren Manor, director of business development for Mentor, A Siemens Business, during productronica about the many benefits of a digital factory and what’s keeping companies from becoming one. Oren also gives examples of big data analytics along with the move to a lot size of one.

Barry Matties: Hello, Oren. First, can you share some of the advantages of being digital?

Oren Manor: We did an analysis, and one major phone company has a 3.4 DPMO, which is extremely good; that’s three defects per million of opportunities. If you calculate the number of devices they are building and the number of components, that’s still about $1.5 billion worth of scrap a year. If you do the same analysis with the big 10 EMS companies, take what they do in a year, and calculate their numbers, you get to a potential scrap of about $1.5 billion. If you put them on a 100 DPMO, which means that even in industry-acceptable or high standards of quality, there’s a lot of scrap. People are using software; they have CAD and MES systems. They have been able to get to this level of quality, but it’s not enough. We need to push it to the next level. And this explains why digitalization here is critical. People say, “This is a Tier 1 problem.”

Now, we have a nice story with a customer called Roy; they’re a mid-sized manufacturer based in Northern Italy not too far from Milan in Biella. They have five SMT lines, and they’re both an OEM and an EMS, which I see more and more. They make products for their own brand and company, but they also contract for other customers because they have the assembly line and capacity. They don’t need all the capacity for their OEM business, so they try to make additional money. They came and said, “We have a bigger device. We want the material to be 100% autonomous in the factory. We don’t want any human being touching the feeder or moving boxes around. We want all of this to be fully automated.”

And with our material management system, we can do that.

To read this entire column, which appeared in the December 2019 issue of SMT007 Magazine, click here.