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Getting More Electronics Assembly Productivity
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
If mass customization problems can be overcome, it is possible to create an agile manufacturing facility that can handle complex customer demands.
By Michael Marsh
The printed circuit board (PCB) assembly industry is a customer-driven market environment. Cost pressures, quality demands and short product cycles are facts of life in bringing the consumer the latest and greatest products. Customers demand innovation, variety, quality and value for their money. New products are entering the market at an unprecedented pace, and a model that is hot today is outdated tomorrow. Research shows that product development life cycles have reduced to seven months in 1999 from 36.5 months in 1992 - an 80 percent decrease.1
To satisfy this demand, many manufacturers employ a strategy of "mass customization" - targeting specialized products for different consumers. To achieve mass customization, manufacturers may have to build 50 or more different products using the same production line one week, and 50 different products on the same line the following week. This change in the production requirements has created the need for a new approach to maximize manufacturing efficiency. Without a new approach, manufacturers will not provide consumers with products that take advantage of the latest and most innovative technologies on the market.
Machine cycle time - how fast an assembly line places components - used to be the biggest consideration in the production process. The thought process was, "If my production line can build one PCB quickly, it can build all my production requirements quickly." This is only true when the production requirements are for a simple, single, high-volume product. However, with mass customization, the problem is much more complex.
Mass Customization Problems
The first problem with mass customization is the need for smaller production lot sizes. With smaller lot sizes, the changeover time required to prepare the assembly line for the next production order becomes more significant. The sequence in which production orders are assembled impacts the changeover time between individual orders. To tackle this problem, a manufacturer must consider overall production requirements and be sure that similar products are grouped in the same production cycle on the same production line. While this sounds trivial, in practice, it is a complex, multidimensional problem requiring computer assistance. If machine downtime can be avoided and bottlenecks identified, yield output can be improved vastly.
Another mass customization problem is the stress placed on factory information systems. If a single product is built in the factory, it is relatively simple to coordinate production with sales requirements, track the production on the shop floor, and coordinate part purchasing and consumption to match production. As the number of products being built increases, management problems increase exponentially. Simply knowing where each product is in the build cycle and what parts need to be ordered becomes complex. One solution is to link the factory with the business systems in a real-time information system. A computerized information network can monitor throughput, store information, anticipate and avoid bottlenecks, redeploy resources to the appropriate areas, and change inefficient operations.
A third mass customization problem is short production cycles making it difficult to tune the production processes. In high-volume manufacturing, there is sufficient time to monitor production yield and quality, identify problem areas, and adjust the process to make improvements. With mass customization, management must react much faster to process problems to successfully optimize production yield. This requires real-time information about product quality and quick reactions to problems. To achieve this, a factory-wide information system that collects production data directly from the assembly line, and a way to disseminate this information quickly and accurately to responsible management for corrective actions, are needed.
The final mass customization problem is the increased complexity of business relationships with vendors and customers. As product numbers increase, software solutions are required to simplify and streamline the entire process. Supply chain management (SCM) software can enable electronics enterprises to react more quickly to customer pressures. Through the use of Internet technology, collaborative planning and optimization technologies, it is possible to achieve agile manufacturing and mass customization. Electronics manufacturers can get immediate notice of changes in sales, and can react immediately to production requirement changes signaled by these sales orders. Sales changes also affect the ordering of parts; this can be transmitted to suppliers immediately, reducing inventories when sales orders drop or advancing deliveries to meet increased sales.
Conclusion
Increasingly complex production requirements change the way the shop floor must be managed. By adopting a computerized factory solution, electronics manufacturers can take the first step towards a more productive operation. Linking this system to an SCM system can create an agile manufacturing environment.
All four of the problems associated with mass customization can be opportunities for those electronics manufacturers that use best-in-class SMT equipment and integrated software solutions. An integrated system empowers manufacturers to tune sophisticated factory operations to prevent bottlenecks, use efficient and safe manufacturing standards, and manage an increasingly complex supply chain. By improving factory operations, production floor investments can be leveraged and the power to manufacture at the speed of demand can be achieved.
- REFERENCE Cahners Electronics Group.
MICHAEL MARSH is president of Tecnomatix Unicam, 2 International Drive, Portsmouth, NH 03801; (603) 431-9411; Fax: (603) 431-9516; E-mail: mmarsh@unicam.com; Web site: www.tecnomatix.com.