To keep pace with the competition, manufacturers need to hear every machine’s story.
Machine data tells SMT manufacturers where they can improve. Making use of that data can be challenging for electronics manufacturers who want to collect, contextualize, and act on data from every machine on the line. The age and origin of machines on production lines can vary greatly. Durable, legacy machines built to last decades often operate next to leading edge equipment. The result is a production line with machines running on dozens of different operating systems and software platforms.
The unifying factor among them is that they all provide data that can be utilized for strategic decision making. Manufacturers must find a way to leverage all the data produced on the manufacturing floor, even if the information is locked in old tools that don’t have the benefit of modern APIs for programmatic data extraction.
How can manufacturers leverage machine data without costly replacement of legacy equipment?
SMT manufacturers seeking to increase day-to-day operational efficiency cannot simply toss out all the “old” machines. It would be too disruptive to production and a budgetary non-starter. Many opt for patchwork solutions with individual production sites implementing partial and disparate solutions that put decision making in siloes and limit the ability to collect and contextualize data.
Manufacturers choosing this strategy can gather legacy machine data in most cases, but it is often incomplete and of limited use for creating process improvements. Competitors who take a holistic approach will be able to access and analyze all machine data, and eventually gain competitive advantage.
Arch provides a global solution that enables you to collect, analyze and act on your machine data. All of it.
Arch empowers electronics manufactures with the capability to collect and contextualize all of the rich machine data needed to discover root causes of waste and inefficiency, as well as identify opportunities for process improvement. Using millions of data points from every machine used in manufacturing, Arch technology solutions provide detailed descriptions of every operation performed and flags errors when they occur.
Extracting complete data and identifying problems is just step one. Issues need to be resolved – or prevented – in as close to real time as possible. Arch helps electronics manufacturers determine how to best make use of this rich data, even using advanced analytics to automatically determine the top problems to address on each production line.
The Arch approach to Industry 4.0 differs from standard AI and machine learning tools. Arch built its platforms on the question, “How would the best SMT expert solve this problem today working on a single line in a single factory?”
The answer was clear: combine expert SMT methodology with advanced big-data algorithms carried out automatically on all lines at once.
Arch’s Sessions Analysis analytics module uses advanced algorithms to study every product cycle on all SMT lines. From this rich machine data, Sessions Analysis automatically knows which cycles should be identical because they are building the same product. The result is an apples-to-apples comparison across thousands of occurrences of theoretically identical machine operations. Automated inference leads to optimized production for each product on every line without any manual input.
Arch collects, contextualizes, and analyzes all data from every machine for a 360⁰ view of the entire manufacturing operations. That is the information that drives improvement for today’s manufacturers.
To learn more about how technology is transforming manufacturing, check out this recent white paper on the subject.