-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- smt007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueBox Build
One trend is to add box build and final assembly to your product offering. In this issue, we explore the opportunities and risks of adding system assembly to your service portfolio.
IPC APEX EXPO 2024 Pre-show
This month’s issue devotes its pages to a comprehensive preview of the IPC APEX EXPO 2024 event. Whether your role is technical or business, if you're new-to-the-industry or seasoned veteran, you'll find value throughout this program.
Boost Your Sales
Every part of your business can be evaluated as a process, including your sales funnel. Optimizing your selling process requires a coordinated effort between marketing and sales. In this issue, industry experts in marketing and sales offer their best advice on how to boost your sales efforts.
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - smt007 Magazine
Web-based Production Monitoring: A Window to the Future
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Web-tracking and monitoring tools deliver the information access and control necessary to integrate vendors and customers into the supply chain. By Bryan Philips
Contract manufacturing (CM) in electronics assembly is experiencing phenomenal growth. Production transfer in this area from OEMs to low-cost, highly flexible and speedy contractors is clearly visible. What may not be so apparent is that many OEMs also are reacting and undertaking significant projects to achieve efficiency levels equal to or greater than their CM counterparts. In either case, the gains are achieved by tightening control over every aspect of the manufacturing operation.
Information Control
Heightened control over the manufacturing process can be achieved by expanding information access to further empower both production and corporate managers. Manufacturers need to look to the competitive advantage of the future: information access and control. The Internet can be leveraged in manufacturing operations for constant information control with real-time data access from global locations. CMs and OEMs alike can use this information access for comparative analyses of quality and throughput benchmarks, as well as to gain a tighter hold on costs via inventory and machine utilization assessments. In short, it offers a new arena for competitive advantage by making production more dynamic, customer-driven and market-sensitive.
Global Electronics Trends
OEMs and CMs are expanding globally. The electronics market is increasingly competitive, with tighter margins, small lot sizes and greater product diversity challenging profitability.
Figure 1. Web-tracking software tools provide a real-time window into any factory in the world, showing current status and production capability.
Responding to market demands has become an international race, driving shorter design cycles, fewer layers of management and a build-to-demand rather than build-to-forecast dynamic. This team approach across cultures and technical disciplines has de manded additional clarity, control and access to communications, both internally and between customers and vendors.
These changes increase the demand for tighter control and better management in manufacturing. A time-tested axiom of management is, "You cannot manage what you cannot measure." Past process measurement tools are too slow, imprecise, confined and costly to operate in today's manufacturing environment.
Customer Requirement Trends
There are several key trends customers require from their manufacturers:
- Automation - Eliminate manual data reporting.
- Speed - Provide real-time measurements regarding currently running production.
- Flexibility - Provide multiple metrics suitable for use by different disciplines such as production, engineering, quality, design and test, and corporate management.
- Accessibility - Allow users at any location (local or remote) to scrutinize the process.
- Exception-based - Automatically iden tify and notify management of exceptions.
- Openness - Integrate communications within the supply chain to better match customer needs and respond more quickly.
Web-tracking Tools
Accessibility and real-time benefits of the Internet provide an excellent environment for addressing these issues. Software has been developed to meet the process measurement needs of electronics manufacturers using the Internet. This software shows each piece of equipment in a manufacturing line as a graphical display, enables the user to check the current machine status and updates real-time machine status from the onsite server via the Web browser (Figure 1). This gives both production and corporate management a real-time window into any of their factories at any time and in any place with an Internet browser.
How Does Web Tracking Work?
While there is not a single answer, all approaches should be simple and straightforward. One software program* incorporates a three-step process that requires no additional software or hardware upgrades for the end user. First, a user accesses the Web via a Web browser and enters a customer-owned Web site address. Next, the user enters a security login code, after which the user can be presented with dialogs for plant location, machine selection and other parameters. Once the targeted facility, line or individual machine has been identified, graphical and textual information originating from an onsite server is delivered to the user's browser.
Figure 2. In-line measurement tools, accessed via the Web, provide a powerful management tool for meeting customer schedules.
The program provides a global tool for quick dissemination of manufacturing information to users (Figure 2). A wizard-like dialog is presented in the browser, guiding and simplifying user input. Once the chart parameters have been specified, the user initiates the request to graph. The charting browser presents tabs, allowing the user to view the graph image, data points, notes and chart parameter description.
Accomplishing a job-by-job or a day-by-day comparative analysis by shift, line or facility, can empower production managers with new information for improving efficiency and profitability. With the ability to access this information via a Web browser, corporate managers also are empowered with the same production information to make decisions and adjust benchmarks globally. At the same time, this global access enables the whole team, from corporate and production management to plant and machine staff, to adjust to changing needs and address customer concerns with enterprise-wide responsiveness.
Flexible/Automatic Reporting
Web-tracking software also provides menus that allow the chart to be saved and refreshed automatically. Configuration parameters used to create the chart can be set up so the same parameters are applied against a later set of data. Another option is to save the chart output itself and send it via e-mail to a list of colleagues for further study and analysis.
Figure 3. Remote access to real-time efficiency rates allows deficiencies to be corrected immediately from any location.
Auto-refresh and auto-save features provide a real-time view of the production process and allow the browser to requery servers from multiple locations, facilitating the ability to automatically generate and distribute reports to a specified group of e-mail addresses (Figure 3). After a user-specified elapsed time, the charting browser will fire a request to the server, update and distribute the new graph image and supporting data. User-defined control limits and alarm levels can be defined to automatically identify exception situations and e-mail recipients with predefined chart data.
Custom Charting
In addition to the set of predefined charts, the user can create custom charts from process metrics source tables. When this type of chart is requested, the chart wizard prompts the user for expressions for the X- (typically time) and Y-axes, along with the other parameters that comprise the predefined charts. The expressions are a combination of column names, numeric literals and arithmetic operators. They can be entered free form or with the assistance of drop-downs that display table/column names and saved expression names.
For time-based machine production charts and custom charts, the user also can enter a performance benchmark and chart the actual data against the benchmark. Benchmark goals can be analyzed for specific charted time intervals for the range specified. This provides a visual cue as to how well the production plan is tracking against user-specified benchmarks.
Web-tracking Benefits
Web-based tracking offers many advantages to both management and staff. Key benefits include:
- Determining real-time trends in machine performance and enabling effective preventive actions.
- Analyzing shifts in production, which can lead to process improvements.
- Analyzing process quality, which can help avoid costly rework and scrap.
- Eliminating the need to collect and analyze information manually.
- Automatically identifying exceptions, freeing up time for personnel to address other issues.
- Allowing access from any location, local or remote, and allowing global scale.
- Allowing access by personnel from other companies in the supply chain to increase process accountability.
- Allowing access by personnel from other departments, such as design, purchasing and sales, to enable these areas to respond more proactively to production.
- Reducing reliance on factory-floor personnel to distribute information about production, empowering offsite production managers and allowing constant information flow to all management levels.
- Accelerating yield curves on new designs, reducing costs and allowing for more frequent design changes.
- Creating operational efficiencies that allow for smaller lot sizes, greater flexibility and lower inventories.
Setting A New Standard
There are many examples of the new Web-tracking and monitoring tools currently available to the electronics industry. These software tools originated from work done with customers preparing for future needs to compete in a more efficient and global manufacturing environment. With Web-based production tracking, not only has the information process become easier and faster within the manufacturing organization, but both the vendor and customer sides of the supply chain have been integrated into the process.
At the pace the industry is moving, it will not be long before the information control and supply chain integration capabilities offered by Web-tracking and monitoring systems become a de facto standard in electronics manufacturing.
- ePlant View is a trademark of Panasonic Factory Automation.
BRYAN PHILIPS can be contacted at Panasonic Factory Automation, Software Systems Group, 9377 W. Grand Ave., Franklin Park, IL 60131; (503) 699-9810; E-mail: bphilips@panasonicfa.com; Web site: www.panasonicfa.com.