To maintain efficient production operations and deliver on time, it is important to balance the priorities of orders, customer specifications and resources with the practical requirements of your SMT lines. A two-stage system has proven to be particularly useful for this purpose, and WORKS Planning and WORKS Logistics from ASMPT’s WORKS Software Suite implement it perfectly.
Delivering on time and cost-effectively is becoming an ever-increasing challenge in a highly competitive industry like SMT manufacturing. While delivering within one week was common some time ago, today’s demanding customers increasingly require deliveries on specific days – all while ordering many different products in small lot sizes. Meeting these challenges requires exceptional flexibility paired with maximum efficiency because cost-related pressures are steadily increasing as well.
More than ever, success depends on intelligent and networked production planning that takes the customer's as well as the manufacturing line’s requirements into account. The goal is to maximize the utilization of existing production capacities while minimizing interruptions and setup changeovers.
At this point if not sooner, the planning process becomes a highly complex optimization task for which the sequence in which orders get produced plays a critical role. For example, simply switching between lead-containing and lead-free solder pastes means that due to their different melting points the production gets interrupted for up to 30 minutes because that is how long it takes for the reflow oven to heat up or cool down. Accordingly, it makes sense to run orders requiring the same type of solder paste consecutively on a line. It should also be noted that some lots require X-ray inspection for ball grid arrays while others involve odd-shaped components (OSCs) that must be placed with the TWIN placement head – special equipment that may not be available on every line.
This relatively simple example with only three critical factors already shows the main problem: the individual requirements overlap and influence each other. In addition, there may be line clearances for certain products and many other factors that play a role. In practice, this quickly results in a highly complex, multidimensional matrix with countless possible variations, only one of which represents the optimal solution.
In many factories that do their planning mostly manually, the quality of their scheduling still depends largely on individual employees. These are usually specialists with many years of experience who already know the products and customers very well. After all, it takes a lot of know-how and experience to reconcile customer and production requirements. Manual planning is therefore fundamentally dependent on individual employees. This often becomes a problem, especially at international locations where the bond to the company is far less pronounced than in Germany. When a qualified scheduler leaves the company, this often leads to a loss of know-how that can affect the entire production, and the already tight market for skilled labor makes it difficult to find suitable replacements.
Even long-term and highly experienced employees can no longer keep track of the entire process matrix. This is especially true when new products must be introduced. Accordingly, it makes sense to automate the planning process, but this is easier said than done. To develop new product, you must know the conditions and processes of modern SMT production very well and take sufficient degrees of freedom into account – after all, no two factories are alike. Pure software developers often fail in this because they lack the necessary experience.
ASMPT is different. The renowned global player covers almost the entire SMT production process with its product portfolio and is intimately familiar with the requirements of modern production lines as a result of its close customer relationships. After defining the functional specifications in minute detail, the market and technology leader opted for a two-stage planning concept and implemented it in the workflow Planning that is part of the WORKS Software Suite.
WORKS Planning elegantly reconciles the requirements of customers and production specialists. At the beginning there is always a rough plan that is created three to five days before the production starts. First, the order data gets imported from the ERP system. The rough planning routine adopts the defined priorities by considering the resulting orders in precisely this order. It starts by looking backwards from the promised delivery date. If this date cannot be met due to resources that are already occupied, the system automatically looks for alternative available and approved resources and plans looking forward with emphasis on maximizing the setup efficiency. On the other hand, the rough planning process focuses exclusively on the customer requirements.
From the factory's perspective, such purely customer-oriented planning is not always feasible because potential material bottlenecks or shortages of specific resources shortfalls may make short-term changes in the production sequence necessary. This is where the detailed planning comes into play, which begins roughly one to two shifts in advance of the production start. It is where the production jobs get assigned to specific lines and corresponding processes such as inventory retrievals and setups are scheduled to ensure the on-time start of the next production round. The WORKS Logistics application develops a planning solution that optimally combines production specifications and deadlines to make the best possible use of the existing production equipment. When the lots are finished, they can even be automatically reported back to the ERP system.
That all this works so well is due to ASMPT's holistic and data-driven Intelligent Factory concept, whose most important principle is its analysis and usage of data that spans lines and encompasses the entire factory. It collects and processes all the information that is generated in the factory and links it via standardized interfaces in order to put it to targeted use for various applications: quality management, fault analysis, effective staff deployment, seamless material flow control, and optimized workflows – such as the planning process in this example.
ASMPT has integrated the complex planning functionality under a very easy-to-use, ergonomic user interface that allows even newcomers to quickly achieve optimal results. This achieves an important goal: WORKS Planning and WORKS Logistics remove most planning activities from their dependence on specific people, thus allowing them to be easily scaled up to new locations. Its implementation is usually very quick and trouble-free. If functional gaps are discovered, the ASMPT team can quickly close them with software extensions.
“In practice, the advantages of the new system become apparent very quickly. The software optimally supports the planner in the needs-based alignment and pooling of orders, for example into family setups. The automated workflow makes it possible to simulate and analyze multiple combinations much more quickly than before. Electronics manufacturers are often amazed at the untapped potential that is still slumbering in their equipment,” Mathias Heinz, Product Manager at ASMPT.
Considering that a modern SMT factory must change all the setups on each line five to six times a day, it becomes quickly apparent how much time can be saved by simply taking a process attribute like lead-free or lead-containing solder paste into account. Practical experience shows that the number of setup processes can be reduced by twenty percent or more. Careful data-driven planning alone can accommodate many an additional order without having to invest in new hardware. There are also significant savings in the area of human resources. While planning 150 to 200 orders per week used to be a full-time job, the person who used to be responsible for this task can now focus on other duties. And last but not least, the more accurate planning improves the adherence to deadlines, which benefits subsequent workflows and ultimately the customer.
“With WORKS Planning, ASMPT raises electronic planning and scheduling to a whole new level. It is the first software that has managed to map and optimize the complex planning process in SMT manufacturing. Put more simply: WORKS Planing makes our customers’ lives much easier,” says Heinz.
