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Two truisms are becoming increasingly apparent in industry: technology is rapidly advancing, leading to more complex products, and more and more nations await this technology advance, resulting in competition requiring an increasing focus on product cost and quality. In a model developed for PCB fabrication, a new, important variable, complexity variable (C)[3], has been increasing steadily since the 1960s at the rate of an order of magnitude every 13 years.
Automation comes from the words AUTOMatic and operATION, and it is a strategic tool for controlling, managing, and directing a productive process by automatic means. It usually is complemented by product and technological innovations. As an engineering discipline, it can be accurately planned; it is mostly arithmetic, not propaganda. The chief ingredients in automation is adequate know-how and common sense.
The business and global factors behind the movement to automation are numerous, these are but four:
- Global competitive pressures
- Growing complexity of product and working situation
- Changing skill availability and job expectations
- Technology availability and its costs
What has not been clear to management is that automation is principally an approach to a company's future business strategy.
Management’s response to automation has usually been fragmented and reactive with numerous requests for new machinery, (now using more computers), new processes and procedures, and the resulting situation has been overlapping or excessive investment requests accompanied by additional staff, with the all too often result of inefficient or incompatible fabrication systems.
Working Definition of Automation
Automation in a working context means more than just automatic machinery. Machinery implies mechanization, automation also means the system information to direct and control the people, materials, and machines, or as coined by many, systemization[4]. Automation, then, is made up of two components, like a vector—the mechanization or material flow, and systemization, the information flow.
Mechanization Classes
Mechanization can be divided into six classes, which indicate the amount of sophistication of machines
and machine interactions with humans, rated as to percent of the work done by machines:
Systemization Levels
By the same token, systemization can be divided into six levels that indicate the amount and sophistication of information, blueprints, data, scheduling, and control that takes place:
Each level has an increasing percentage of machine/computer content to handling the information required to fabricate, schedule, test or move a product.
Automation Matrix
When both measures are applied to any activity in the process to tool or build a printed circuit, then an automation matrix is created about that work center. This matrix, as illustrated in Figure 6, allows for the current situation to be appraised (even if it's all manual) as well as future objectives and plans. It is quite common to make automation objectives a number of steps or phases, in this way allowing each step to be stabilized before the next one is taken. The automation matrix lends itself to this step approach.
Figure 6: Automation vector is defined as systemization and mechanization including ‘material handling’ between work centers and networking between work centers.
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