Nov 30, 2018
About The Customer
The customer is an American global aerospace and defense technology company and one of the largest arms traders in the world. Engineering's Industries eXcellence team has been working with the customer as their strategic Digital Manufacturing partner for a number of years and across numerous divisions in the customer's organization. As an integral step in helping the customer move towards their Industry 4.0 vision, our team is kicking off an exciting plant connectivity pilot for the customer to support their semiconductor manufacturing division.
The Customer’s Need
The customer needs to improve the way they monitor and control the performance of their surface-mount technology and machines in their circuit board and micro-processor manufacturing facilities. The semiconductor manufacturing industry poses a plethora of daunting challenges that must be handled, including high complexity of product and process, high speed of the manufacturing process, high volume of components that must be handled during production and high level of precision required.
About the Project
The pilot project we will be delivering will help bridge the digital gap between the business level and the manufacturing floor for the customer. In addition, our connectivity solution will help the customer start to monitor the performance of their shop floor equipment in real-time, evaluate analytics, and as a result react faster to unforeseen events, make better decisions and improve the communication between production and management.
The project will begin in one of the customer's North American plants where they have machines that they use in their manufacturing to put together electronic components. The machines are super high-speed and have hundreds of potential datapoints that can be monitored and read to better understand and control the different aspects of the manufacturing process. Currently, the customer is not doing any of that in a digital or manual way. For the pilot, after an in-depth analysis of the customer's use cases and requirements, our Industries eXcellence picked two identical production machines, looked at the data that could potentially be collected from it, and will implement a digital solution including:
1. Designing, building and deploying a customizable dashboard on the shop floor, so that the customer's operators can monitor machines and machine statuses in real time;
2. Designing, building and deploying an interface to expose that data to the customer's ERP system (SAP in this case), so that the customer's executive and management personnel can have access to more complex, more intelligent reporting and improve decision-making.
3. Building a reference architecture for the customer, and delivering a "global template" design document that will be used as a roadmap to scale and expand the successful plant connectivity pilot to the rest of their operations.
Ultimately, the aim is to help the aerospace customer attain a future state of an enterprise-level Bus to support an entire ecosystem of systems and a wide variety of equipment leveraging SEC/GEMS, OPC, Internet of Things and Edge Devices.
Engineering’s Advantage
In the USA, Engineering Industries eXcellence’s work in the area of electronic and semiconductor manufacturing is growing significantly. This is an exciting new initiative for our division, dedicated to guiding companies along their digital transformation journeys towards Industry 4.0. We look forward to delivering a successful plant connectivity pilot for this leader in Aerospace & Defense manufacturing, then supporting their strategic plan to expand the solution across all of their production sites worldwide. This project will also help our team grow their expertise and offering in the electronics and semiconductor manufacturing space, which will be of critical importance to many of our customers, who rely on our digital solutions to stay competitive and deliver the highest quality product to their consumer.
