Apr 18, 2019
About the Customer
The customer is an American Aerospace & Defense technology company and a global leader in the manufacturing of advanced electronics. The customer’s electronics environment is diverse and manufacturing processes include Surface-Mount Technologies (SMTs), Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs), and Surface-Mount Devices (SMDs).
Engineering Industries eXcellence has been the customer’s strategic Digital Manufacturing partner for a number of years now. Our partnership began with the completion of a 13-site assessment of the customer’s business drivers, processes, functional requirements, gaps and legacy systems in order to help them define their unique Industry 4.0 strategy, implementation roadmap and timeline. Since then, our Industries eXcellence specialists have continued to work together with the customer to implement the digital foundation necessary to ensure their successful transition to Industry 4.0. Our latest initiative has focused on automating data collection in the manufacture of electronics for their radar systems division.
The Customer’s Need
Our team recently kicked off a pilot project aiming to help the customer’s semiconductor manufacturing division automate and standardize the collection and management of all the data coming from the various machines and different equipment on their shop floor. Currently, all machine data is being collected manually by an operator as he or she moves from machine to machine. This has led to significant time and resource costs, a high risk of unreliable data, process inconsistencies, as well as no means of aggregating, analyzing or evaluating the data collected in a timely or efficient manner.
About the Project
Our team has been tasked to deliver a single integrated solution able to collect and organize all of the data coming off of the customer’s semiconductor manufacturing floor, then expose it to the business layer in order to provide smart data analytics to improve the customer’s decision-making processes and overall performance.
The project began with an in-depth analysis of the customer’s current manufacturing environment, requirements and goals. As a result of the analysis, our consultants delivered a Reference Architecture that could be used as a guideline to drive the development and implementation of the final solution, taking into account the following for the customer:
- Business Mission, Vision & Strategy
- Software Systems
- Process Concerns
- Usability, Maintainability, Scalability, Availability, Extensibility, Security & Portability
- Legacy Integration/Interoperability
In order to successfully standardize and automate data collection, every piece of equipment and every system on the customer’s shop floor needed to be able to communicate with each other. Using the expertise of our technical specialists, following the Reference Architecture delivered by our consulting team, and leveraging the partnerships we have with leading software providers, our Industries eXcellence team designed and developed a customized, integrated solution for automated machine data collection based on the Siemens PLM technology stack and PAC from ZNT Richter. PAC is an application designed to facilitate communication, data collection and control of equipment within a manufacturing context across a wide range of standard and non-standard communication protocols. PAC translates and standardizes the data from all the machines on the customer's shop floor, collects and archives the data, and finally exposes it to Layer 3 systems such as MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). This digital communication layer further enables the availability of intelligent and reliable data analytics for the customer’s plant and business managers in real time, driving smarter decisions on the production floor.
Engineering’s Advantage
Automated collection of data will reduce the possibility of human error in the customer’s data collection process, thereby improving the overall accuracy of collected data. Moreover, our solution will enable data to be instantly made available, reducing potential delays in information dissemination across the enterprise and increasing the overall level of information transparency throughout the entire enterprise. Faster, more accurate, more available data enables decision-makers at all levels throughout the enterprise to make smarter, better informed decisions. After a successful pilot implementation of our solution, the project is planned to expand to cover all of the customer's manufacturing facilities in North America.
