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Cogiscan’s Greg Benoit recently published a white paper series on material tracking in the EMS sector, in which he argues that achieving a fully integrated MES infrastructure requires more than a software package to make the system work at its best. In this interview, Greg discusses the white paper series in more depth. You can download the two-part Cogiscan white paper, Strategies for Efficient Material Management in Circuit Board Assembly, from our Industry Resource Center: Part 1 and Part 2.
Nolan Johnson: Greg, the general thesis of your recent white papers is that accuracy and efficiency are much more granular than many people think. Are EMS companies missing an opportunity here?
Gregory Benoit: At Cogiscan, the first step is always the most important: When implementing a material management solution, start at the right level. If you're still managing material at the warehouse level, take a step back. Material control starts with tracking every individual container, reel, tray, tube, and plastic bin. To track those individual containers, you need a unique ID (UID) on each one. Essentially, this is a serial number; some manufacturers refer to this ID as a license plate. Without this, you're not ready to do anything else.
Johnson: That's a pretty bold statement. Of the EMS providers out there, who's ready for that?
Benoit: It varies with the organization’s size and maturity. Many EMS providers don't have this in place. For a lot of the customers we talk to, we start here. Cogiscan offers a solution for this kind of material serialization, but more companies than you might think are not at the point where they have material uniquely identified like this.
Johnson: This isn’t something that can be completed over a weekend shutdown, so what does a general implementation look like? How do you get clients ready to actually start with automation?
Benoit: To start, many ERP systems don't have the capability to label all material with a unique identifier, so we always start there. We determine how their current material receiving process works and where the solution will fit within their systems to add this material-tracking capability. You do all the labeling, which takes time, and only then can you move on to actually automating material tracking throughout your smart storage solution, your traditional rack, or on a placement machine in an X-ray counter or other locations. After all the material is labeled, you implement controls and disciplines throughout different systems and storage locations, wherever material could go on the shop floor.
Johnson: Do you recommend encoding specific item information into the UID, or is it truly just a serial number?
Benoit: For a real material management solution, you don't necessarily need to put everything into that one serial number and have it scanned from there. Instead, you want the serial number, the license plate, to be registered in the system. All the other information—supplier, date code, lot code, moisture sensitivity information, part thickness—is a part of a record for that material. When that UID is scanned at any location, all the systems have access to all the other information they might need.
Johnson: To use a programming term, the UID is just a pointer into the record in the database where all the information is kept, right?
Benoit: Exactly. That's why some people call it a license plate number, just like when a cop reads your license plate, they get your name, birthdate, and the car owner's license information.
Johnson: Now, once a shop has implemented the labeling system, they’re ready to hook into the ERP system to set it up, except that some ERP systems aren't set up to handle this level of tracking. Now what?
Benoit: The ERP, in general, normally will cover you up through the warehouse level. That works fine when you don't need to track each reel individually; you just need the quantities. Once you’re on the shop floor, you need to know where things are placed.
This is why we caution against trusting your ERP for shop floor details, because it usually doesn’t have UID capability. Plus, they're not tied in with all the equipment and systems on the shop floor. At the end of the day, you want a material control solution for the shop floor that's tracking everything about the material being used. Periodically, you do a “back flush” to the ERP to update the parts consumed on the floor in the last time interval. Now the ERP can update its quantities in -l overall inventory.
Johnson: While the ERP receives incremental updates, is there a tracking infrastructure that needs to be placed on the shop floor?
Benoit: In this age of smart material storage, many systems can now interact with material: towers, smart racks, X-ray counters, placement machines, and traditional storage racks. Then there’s the ERP. Everything has to be integrated so they can all speak to one another. When a system needs to know how much of a component is left or where a part is, it has access to current information that tells it exactly where it is and how much remains.
Regarding the different points of use for material on the shop floor, line stock can be in standard racks. We label every storage location on that rack, and when an operator goes to pull or put a material in, they scan the slot location: scan out, scan in.
Smart storage solutions are becoming increasingly popular. These are the smart racks, or material storage towers. These devices have automated sensing capabilities. A storage tower, for example, can automatically scan the reel and know what's been moved and where. So, integrate with that to automatically retrieve the data without any operator intervention. It’s similar to some smart racks, which have a presence sensor to detect when material is loaded.
Then there are the parts on the placement machines themselves. You usually have some kind of setup validation solution where you're scanning the material being loaded onto the pick-and-place machine, and your material control solution is integrated to know where things are loaded.
This is very important. It requires a system integration component; all these systems must be connected and communicate in real time at all times to implement a full material control solution.
That's how all of this serves as a nerve center for all these different solutions. It can keep track of where everything is at any given time; it becomes the single source of truth for the location of material on the shop floor.
Johnson: I’m imagining one operator walking up to another and saying, "I'm looking for this particular capacitor," and after querying the material management system for a couple of seconds, the second operator might respond, "That's line two, currently on the pick-and-place machine."
Benoit: Exactly. Pull up a PDA, input a part number, and you know right where the parts are.
Johnson: That's the scenario when you want that level of detail. Does the ERP system need real-time location data to, say, give purchasing the data they need to manage reorder cycles?
Benoit: Correct. The ERP just cares about how much I have left, not where it is. The ERP uses it for its material resource planning. It needs the quantities on hand and the order-based requirements to decide how much to order.
For example, I was working with an automotive OEM in Europe on a factory digitalization project. Their main problem was that, at any given time, they knew they had between 600,000 and 1.2 million euros’ worth of excess material on their shop floor, but they had no idea what or where it was.
It's this black hole we talk about when you just have an ERP, and the material gets issued to the shop floor. You have no way of knowing what's been used. You run into shortages because you don't have the parts you thought you had, have excess inventory, or have both, depending on the part. So, we installed a material management solution, and after some months, when the material had cycled, they did a full cycle count and found that the excess inventory number went to almost zero. There's big money in this. It’s a high-value solution that can save manufacturers real money.
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