Just the way you want latest gadget available ex-stock the store near, OEMs of the industry are pushing EMS companies to reduce cycle time and serve the customers in the shortest time spam possible. Here are some trends re-defining process cycle of the EMS companies globally and Indian market.
Managing the original equipment manufacturer (OEM)/ electronics manufacturing services (EMS) relationship includes receiving and analyzing specifications and managing design information and changes, providing accurate and competitive bids with estimates of cost and production times, managing design information and changes, collaborating across the entire life of the product, managing internal and external production factors, and in the case of an original design manufacturer (ODM) supplier, delivering a robust design environment that can map customer requirements and specifications to a successful product design. Enable EMS companies to effectively collaborate with OEM customers, and optimize the manufacturing of increasingly complex products requires efficient “Process Cycle Management”. This article will bring out to you some developments in Process cycle optimization in terms of Indian shop floor. Here we go…
Production ramp up time, pricing pressures, customer changes, technology changes, global markets and supply chains are some of the top issues facing electronics manufacturing services providers today. Whether your OEM customer is a consumer or an industrial electronics company, or your company provides full design and logistical services as an ODM, product lifecycles continue to shrink, which means bringing increasingly complex products to global markets entails more effort and risk than ever before. EMS providers must optimize electronics manufacturing productivity to meet the demands of global OEM customers, requiring high flexibility and agility. EMS companies must manage operational complexity, have a global support footprint, and address constant pressure to drive costs down, while continuously promoting operational excellence. Pressures in the EMS Industry
ü Continuous cost pressures
ü Operational excellence (including supply chain management, manufacturing)
ü High flexibility
ü Global support of customers
ü Knowledge of needs in different industries
Today’s manufacturers are at an inflection point. On the one hand, EMS companies need to become more agile and respond more quickly to changing customer demand amid increased supply chain complexity. On the other hand, they need to embrace new technologies and process/product innovation to continuously adapt to competitive pressures, worldwide. Plant operations stand at the center of this strategic change and are a critical lever for addressing growing business-technology challenges. While plants must collaborate seamlessly and efficiently with other facilities, as well as supply chain and innovation partners, many manufacturers still operate as disconnected plants, with non-harmonized operations management processes, non-standardized operations technology and legacy applications. Moreover, they have limited appetite and budget to adopt new technologies. The situation calls for a comprehensive approach to transforming plant operations management to enable ingrained agility, predictability, responsiveness and efficiency. Today’s global economy presents manufacturers with a host of new challenges, as well as opportunities. Complex value chains, continuing economic uncertainty and changing customer demographics are forcing manufacturers to continuously adapt to dynamic business conditions. Meanwhile, the next industry revolution is taking hold (i.e., Industry 4.01), as new technologies and process innovations present opportunities for manufacturers to take advantage of the changing environment. To address stated challenges, manufacturers must re-examine their operating models and priorities related to sourcing materials, production, fulfillment, new product introduction, supply chain efficiency, resource utilization, etc.
Target for Today’s EMS Industry?
EMS providers must optimize electronics manufacturing productivity to meet the demands of global OEM customers, requiring high flexibility and agility. EMS companies must manage operational complexity, have a global support footprint, and address constant pressure to drive costs down, while continuously promoting operational excellence. Further EMS providers need to cope with multiple live products at any given time.
Challenges for Manufacturers
Manufacturers must simultaneously contend with the changing nature of the manufacturing model by applying new technologies and respond to customers’ highly demanding fulfillment targets. At their core, these challenges include:
ü Addressing demanding customers by creating agile fulfillment capabilities.
ü Remaining relevant amid market volatility.
ü Meeting demand for more personalized products by bringing customer intelligence to the production floor, adding a higher level of complexity to the configuration and fulfillment cycle.
ü Attracting employees amid radical changes in workforce demographics (i.e., millennials and employees with millennial mindsets).
ü Understanding complex business models (i.e., a complex supply chain, contract manufacturing, global operations, volatile demands and higher product variants) that can reduce efficiency.
ü Staying on top of increased merger and acquisition activity, adding heterogeneity to business processes as well as the technology stack.
ü Driving real-time and predictive intelligence from the huge data sets that are collected throughout the supply chain, including production processes (i.e., plants).
Manufacturing has generally been seen as a laggard in adopting new technology, but the emergence of social, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies (the SMAC Stack™) and the Internet of Things (IoT) is opening new vistas for manufacturers to explore. With the ongoing Industry 4.0 revolution, the boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds will increasingly cease to exist, particularly as IP-addressable/aware devices define the connected, smart factory. New operating models will emerge as physical material and information merge into one, since the digital bits and bytes contained in both will be tightly linked as more and more digital data is embedded into the supply chain.
Manufacturers will have more technologies on hand to power smart sensors, smart machines and smart wearables, which will take manufacturing to the next level of agility and productivity. Smart sensors with IoT platforms will generate numerous digital code surrounding people, process, organizations and devices, throughout the manufacturing space. Using these data collections, manufacturers could detect failure patterns to warn maintenance operators about a possible breakdown well ahead of its occurrence. Such predictive alarms and information can help save costly breakdowns. Similarly, batch production information — with detailed Meta data on process conditions — can help create product Code Halos that, in turn, can help manufacturers analyze and improve batch yields. Factories (and small plants) are already emerging in which all employees — from supervisors to plant managers to senior leaders — share real-time information and access plant analytics to improve operational efficiency and productivity. As a result, essential elements of manufacturing are converging like never before, creating “informed manufacturing.”
According to IDC, 30% of manufacturers by 2016 will invest substantially in increasing the visibility and analysis of information exchange and business processes, both within the company and with partners. Further, IDC also estimates that this year, 65% of companies with more than 10 plants will enable the factory floor to make better decisions through investments in operational intelligence. Key capabilities include:
ü Integrated supply chain and innovation capabilities that help to improve agility, reduce manufacturing and innovation cycle time, and improve resource utilization.
ü Real-time and predictive capabilities to reduce response time, improve planning and boost resource utilization via dynamic planning; improve visibility; and achieve predictable performance.
ü Collaborative operations management to improve knowledge-sharing and best practices within and across the plant.
ü Standardized and future-proofed OT to rationalize the operations technology footprint and improve productivity by adopting new technologies. General Motors already sees Google Glass technology as a tool to improve assembly line productivity to deliver real-time images and videos, as well as on-the-job training/work instruction.
Goals include:
ü Higher customer satisfaction by delivering the right product at the right time and at the right price.
ü More efficient plant operations by cutting waste and reducing input material and operations costs (including energy and utility expenses) and improving inventory turns.
ü Improved regulatory compliance by adopting total quality management (TQM) discipline from design to delivery. This will help to improve customer satisfaction, as well as reduce overall manufacturing cycle time.
Whats next
To prepare for the next wave of industry revolution, manufacturers will quickly need to close gaps between plant and enterprise operations, as well as between operations technologies and new information technologies. To achieve this, manufacturers must adopt a comprehensive approach to transforming plant operations management. A successful transformation initiative requires the following:
- The understanding that transformation is a journey, not a sprint, that requires buy-in from all stakeholders (corporate business users, corporate IT, plant IT, plant users, owners of various strategic initiatives, such as Lean Six Sigma, etc.).
- A phased approach to align plant(s) with the enterprise vision and a defined roadmap to reach a future state.
- The ability to identify strategic actions that address current plant challenges and align with the overall vision.
- And, perhaps most importantly, the wherewithal to choose a credible partner that can help in realizing overall transformation goals.
Plants of the future will need to be seamlessly integrated with the extended supply chain and innovation cycle, operating with greater agility and efficiency. All plants, including contract manufacturers, will need to work as a single ecosystem to fulfill customer demands, thereby improving customer satisfaction across the board. Role-based and secure plant information/transactions will be available anytime, anywhere and in real-time, on any device (mobile, laptop or desktop computer, wearable, etc.). Plant operations will automatically adjust or respond to adverse events within the supply chain. Plant, product and machine Codes will aid in predictive intelligence and drive proactive actions. Experts with IoT and Industry 4.0 technologies will be able to remotely work with floor operators in a collaborative manner to improve efficiency, with remote experts able to not only view the real-time health of plants but also identify machine failure locations through video and photo sharing.
Is Automation an answer to Cycle time reduction
Is taking an overview of EMS industry of India, there are few very basic and probably critical concerns. Number one, labor costs are rising, which everybody knows. Second, people are looking at quality control. Eventually, things made by machines will be better than those made by human hands. If you take a look at the past decade, SMT machines, AOI, SPI, printing, every process in the front-end is using automation. Now, the trend is moving toward the backend: the router, odd-form placement, and also the test handler, because for consumer or automotive electronics, auto components need to be tested—there’s also a huge demand for automation. Basically, right now, a lot of people are using non-standard solutions. But we are providing a standard solution for test handling. Not quickly but the future of the industry is more automated and connected. Eventually, there will only be a few people in the production line because SMT, printing and AOI, SPI and router, insertion, testing, laser, and dispensing will all be automated. Summarized benefits of automation can be:
- Improve product design and reduce design times using quality data
- Reduce time-to-quality by tightly integrating quality management with manufacturing execution
- Drive quality improvements with Six Sigma initiatives
- Reduce defects and error-proof production using lean initiatives
- Sharereal-time data with OEMs
- Provide customers real-time order status via the Web
- Manage global repair operations for visibility into systems
- Analyze data to improve efficiency and quality
- Reduce cycle times
- Address regulatory compliance issues
In words of Randall Williams, mechanical automation engineer, B&P Automation Inc, “any automation design combines a group of process steps into a ‘cell’ that leverages existing technologies: robotics, machine vision, part conveyance, specialized processing equipment. All of these technologies will reduce ‘handling’ time for each part. The additive effect is always significant reduction in cycle time for those processes. Equipment is designed in close proximity so that material movements are predictable, brief, and very repetitive. The caveat is that fewer workers will be required—often only one—but that operator has to be a much higher caliber individual.”
Conclusion
Amid a new era of growth, manufacturing has a crucial role to play in moving both developed and developing economies forward. In this new era of manufacturing, businesses need to realign their strategy to address the challenges of agility, efficiency and volatility. Accepting the need automation and transformation of plant operations management is a critical first step in upgrading Indian EMS industry to the next generation of smart and fast users.
