Will The “Internet of Manufacturing” Really Impact Business?

Estimated reading time: 20 minutes

The effects of unexpected delays and consequences of changes however can be complex to calculate and get right because of the many issues that have to be taken into account, such as delivery demands, equipment changeovers, material and resource availability, and process dependencies. The greater the amount of visibility and the intelligence of the live operation, including accuracy and timeliness, the greater the opportunity for improvement.

If there was a way to have every possible piece of information available in a standard and automated way, with computerization able to take that data and continuously tune the production activity and flow, the SMT-based assembly factory could become extremely flexible and able to fulfill complex delivery needs as is required when working with a short or almost non-existent distribution chain. The effect of this increase in flexibility without loss of performance could reverse the trend of moving manufacturing off-shore.

"State of the Art" Computerization Today

The adoption of computerization on the SMT-based shop-floor is in a poor state. Without an established standard for communication, equipment vendors have been free to develop and implement whatever they like. Originally, SMT machine communication was based on the need for measuring and fine-tuning machine performance. Because machines from different vendors can have fundamentally different operational mechanisms, the parameters, format, and protocols for communication have all started with different paths.

As customers wanted to replace their original manual methods of production data collection with automated data capture, they requested different information in various ways from machine vendors. And, for key customers, especially where working with third-party software vendors, the machine vendors would expose or create protocols and formats that would in some way meet the customers’ needs. The largest machine vendors, such as ASM and Fuji, created their own proprietary broader format that could cover many of their latest machines to reduce the number of individual requests they had to support, which initially reduced their costs, and then went on to create for them an additional revenue stream.

Other machine vendors’ efforts were more limited in scope, embracing some of the many attempts at machine-communications standards, the most significant of which are CAM-X and GEM-SECS. The GEM-SECS standard has been successfully applied to semiconductor manufacturing, focusing on architecture and protocol definitions, through which individual processes declare their operations and capabilities and enabling services that can automatically execute them. The weakness of the SECS-GEM standard when applied to SMT production is that data is not managed or defined. In the case of the relatively simple semiconductor processes, this has not been a major issue, but it has little scope to address the complex needs of SMT.

Alternatively, the CAM-X standard, an XML-based format, also defines a method of architecture and protocol. It also includes a rudimentary definition of data exchange format specifically orientated for SMT. Effectiveness of the standard was short-lived, however, as evolving machine complexities and increasing functionality expectations rapidly led to extensive need and use of customization. This increased the verbosity of the protocol so that it could never be used without modification in anything but the simplest applications, such as run-rate dashboards. CAM-X has enjoyed a better success than GEM- SECS within SMT, although neither standards has been widely adopted.

The incentive to resolve these kinds of issues through the introduction of new standards or the enhancements of existing standards is not strongly supported by the key SMT machine vendors because revenue streams from sales of their proprietary software tools are now seen as important to their business. So it has been left to third-party software vendors to provide support for the countless interfaces that are unique to specific machine models or platforms which neutralize, transfer, and combine data. This support involves considerable difficulty and expense because, while SMT machine vendors continue to adapt, customize, and create protocols and formats, they leave behind a significant legacy of machines with “special needs” for reliable communication with accurate data interpretation.

A successful Internet of Manufacturing standard has to be able to model even the most diverse and complex SMT and related process so that the data obtained will satisfy any need to which it is applied. The application of computerization in PCB assembly currently has to exist on top of these platforms, where only the best third-party providers can provide data and information across all processes on the shop-floor in a way that is reliable enough to trust automated decision-making based on the data, such as Lean delivery of materials and finite production planning.

For most of the industry who are not taking advantage of such tools, the default position is computerization done by humans. Dashboards for many KPIs related to performance, quality, and materials are almost mandatory today in PCB assembly manufacturing. Engineers, operators, and managers continuously assess the likely accuracy of what they are seeing and the need to take action. For most SMT production floors building a high mix of products, though the machines do not appear to be working most of the time, and there are excuses and reasons why this is necessary. In this situation, figuring out how to take effective action is often beyond the scope of human analysis given the variability of the data and the time available.

New Technology Needed to Support the Internet of Manufacturing

The word “Internet” implies an access of information by a person who is looking for some information seemingly randomly. For an Internet of Manufacturing, each production machine and process has to include what is effectively a web server that provides clients with whatever information they may need using something analogous to a standard browser. A built-in standard communications engine at each SMT-related process is actually a requirement today already, because many different messages can come from the machine that represents a single event of significance, and they all need to be collected in real-time to then be interpreted together to create the knowledge of the event.

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