TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Originally Printed in the November 2001 Issue of
Circuits Assembly
Magazine
INFORMATION VISIBILITY FOR OEMs AND EMS PROVIDERS
The availability of Web-based manufacturing information can better integrate
OEMs and EMS providers–and ultimately improve their relationship.
The
contract electronics assembly industry is maturing and facing new
challenges as each CEM strives to differentiate itself by giving its
customers unique advantages and greater value. As with any company,
there are opportunities for improvement in business practices,
manufacturing processes, etc. When the leadership of a CEM looks to
identify the primary threats to their profitability and customer
satisfaction, issues such as quoting, communication with customers,
efficient change control, and many more come to mind.
There is typically a commonality to a large number of these threats;
information visibility and access, as well as the collaborative
processing of this information. CEMs are faced with several points in a
project life-cycle which are inhibited by poor access to centralized
information, and very often an inability to efficiently offer
manufacturing information access to customers. Some typical throttling
points in the process include obtaining information from customers
efficiently, communicating results back to them responsively, overhead
and time in new product introductions and engineering changes, and
efficient and easy information access and the communication of ideas and
changes both internally and externally.
If all of these problems are taken as a whole, data visibility is at the
core of the issue—today’s CEMs ultimately have the information they need
to produce product and communicate to customers, but they can
distinguish themselves by how well they disseminate it to their own
personnel and especially to their customers.
TransCollaborative Manufacturing Software (TCM) provides the framework
to organize, store, and control information and then make it easily
accessible so personnel can better perform their jobs, and makes
customers more closely involved in the entire process from project
quoting to field repair. It is a technology which improves the
relationship a CEM has with its customers through its operation in the
enterprise.
To create a CEM enterprise with truly transparent and accessible
manufacturing information, there are two primary needs of the CEM:
Create an efficient and user-friendly “digital dialog” with customers at
several key inflection points in a project or product life cycle.
Manufacturing information within the CEM enterprise must be accessible
and efficiently managed.
THE CUSTOMER VISIBILITY CHALLENGE
Consider the many points in the life cycle of a contract with a CEM
customer when efficient information visibility and access are crucial to
moving forward consistently and quickly, without losing control and
introducing quality problems (Figure 1.). The first step involves
obtaining customer product data. This information takes many forms
including CAD, bill of materials data, approved vendor and manufacturer
requirements, supporting documentation, specification control documents,
etc. The traditional means of handling this information is through
relatively manual transfer, or in some cases, exchange-based software
tools. Both methods disconnect the customer from the CEM and preclude an
efficient “digital dialog”. Furthermore, there are often errors within
customer data, resulting in an iterative process of communicating these
problems to the customer, once again without a seamless mechanism with
which to conduct this communication.
Another step in the beginning of the relationship involves quoting and
design for manufacturability. The customer offers the product design,
but the CEM possesses all of the process information about their factory
or factories. Quickly analyzing the producibility of a product against a
factory can be a very difficult task. DFM tools developed primarily at
the fabrication level do not touch the factory floor adequately or
possess the granular knowledge of routing and total process capability
to provide legitimate feedback on the potential of process-centric
cost-saving design changes.
Further along in the project, after the customer has decided to have the
product produced, another point of dialog becomes important. When the
process is developed and the bill of materials is cleaned and
established, the approval of prepared data must be obtained as quickly
as possible. In many cases, the CEM does not offer the customer
involvement in this process, but this can lead to disputes later in the
process. The CEM / Customer relationship can be strengthened by
involving the customer in the electronic approval process prior to
release to avoid discovering problems once the product is already being
produced.
Very few CEMs have the capability to give their customers controlled
access to quality or tracking data being derived from the manufacture of
their products or the progress of their orders. This separates the
customer from the actual processing of their product, which is, of
course, very important to them. For the CEM’s who do offer this benefit
to their customer presently, the compilation and communication of this
information typically involves a great deal of overhead and manual work,
and furthermore, the real-time benefit of the information is lost.
THE INTERNAL VISIBILITY CHALLENGE
In addition to the points in a product’s developmental cycle requiring a
digital dialog with the customer, there are a vast number of activities
within the CEM enterprise requiring efficient internal information
visibility.
Rapidly developing the previously analyzed product information into the
final process, with documentation and machine programs pertinent to the
most ideal routing is key to an efficient new product introduction.
Central visibility to all facets of the factory and its capabilities is
critical at this stage.
Once the process is developed, the electronic approval cycle becomes a
bottleneck in many enterprises, as it is often paper-based. Management
typically lacks visibility to the status of the full scope of approval
processes, and cannot easily monitor the reasons for rejections flowing
in from many sources.
The delivery of visual, dynamic documentation to the factory has proven
difficult, as systems have not been available in a web-centric platform
which are capable of supporting documentation beyond simple linked
electronic files. Giving line operators access to dynamic, visual, and
multimedia information complete with the full bill of materials and
quality information has proven elusive.
Management within the CEM requires status monitoring and product
tracking. Many software systems have been available for this purpose.
However, ERP and other manufacturing execution software (MES) systems
have not been web-based and lack the visibility to the design data,
revision control, the full visual document set, the storage and
knowledge of machine parameters, and therefore they lack the ability to
track the full scope of the process.
Web-based visibility to quality data and to product and component
tracking data and genealogy has also been elusive. Many manufacturers
spend enormous effort manually compiling product tracking data when
product installed in the field fails and must be repaired or retrofit.
THE NEXT–GENERATION CEM
TCM software enables the CEM to eliminate the information voids along
the road to product release, in production, and out into the field
(Figure 2.). In an enterprise employing TransCollaborative Manufacturing
software, things proceed much differently than in the traditional CEM
enterprise.
Product Data Communication
At the beginning of the process, the communication of design and product
configuration data from customer to CEM is improved. This is
traditionally a disconnected effort in which the customer gathers their
information, sends it along to the CEM (perhaps through a software tool,
but usually not) and then waits for notification of any errors which
might be uncovered. An iterative process then begins until all issues
are resolved. The problem with this method lies in the lack of
“customer-side” troubleshooting of even the most gross data problems. In
the TCM software model, the customer uses their browser to load in
product data and BOM data. The loading is actually occurring in the TCM
server at the CEM, but from the customer’s perspective, it appears as a
simple desktop browser utility. They validate the information using the
full power of the TCM server, but are doing so through a secure and
remote web interface. When errors are revealed and resolved, the TCM
system stores the information from the customer until process engineers
and configuration managers begin work on it at the CEM. This process
eliminates many problems in the basic data without time-wasting
iterations between the CEM and their customers. Some have put forth an
“ASP” or Application Service Provider model for these activities, in
which a third party provides an on-line bridge between the CEM and their
customer. This model for design collaboration places an unnecessary
middle party in a process which can be more efficiently conducted from
the CEMs server where the TCM system resides. Through the TCM method,
the middle-party cost is eliminated, the mission-critical data never
leaves the CEM, and the CEM is not dependent on other parties for the
service. The TCM solution is technologically similar and functionally
identical to the ASP model, except the technology is licensed by and
resides with the CEM, making it a more elegant and cost efficient
solution for engineering collaboration.
PROCESS–CENTRIC DFM
When data is received in the TCM server, the engineers “apply” the
product to a factory or multiple factories. Since the TCM software
offers visibility to factory layouts, machine definitions, routing
configurations, product revision and product process revisions, and
virtually everything about how prior products have been assembled, a
process-centric analysis can be performed. DFM from a bare-board or
component layout perspective is valuable, but DFM with regard to actual
process capability and factory configuration is the way to reducing
ongoing manufacturing cost. CEM engineers can “apply” the product design
to their factories and determine potential cost savings, see the lines
and processes the product would require, and feed back suggestions to
the customer to assist them in making the product less expensive to
produce.
RAPID DATA PREP FOR PRODUCT INTRODUCTION
The next phase assumes data is received and problems are resolved. The
software system then allows engineers to quickly set up component
assignment along the routing, optimize and program machines, and
automatically develop comprehensive documentation sets (Figure 3.).
Setup checklists for the process and logical routing decision points are
established. Using the software, this process happens extremely rapidly,
primarily due to simplified and centralized access to the full scope of
manufacturing resources available within the enterprise.
ELECTRONIC APPROVAL CYCLES
Regardless of the speed of data preparation for introducing a product to
the factory, the approval of a BOM and process for production release
can halt the race to begin assembling product. In a TCM environment, the
software issues notifications to persons who must review process,
documentation, and bills of materials. These persons then simply enter
their web browsers and review the full depth of information from the
central server. They may also reject with reason, and the TCM system
facilitates the return of the feedback to the originators to assist with
the required corrections. Managers monitor the progress and outstanding
issues of all approval cycles to instantly learn why certain projects
haven’t reached the factory floor, and what they must do to fix the
problem. Perhaps more importantly, CEM customers can be put in the
approval cycle via remote web-based access. This gives the customer a
final approval in a product’s journey to production, reducing disputes
later in the process and eliminating the risk of an eroded
customer/vendor relationships caused by disputes.
DELIVERY OF INFORMATION TO THE FACTORY
When approvals are obtained electronically, the delivery of information
to the factory is instantaneous via the web. Work and job order data is
harvested from the ERP system or input manually, pre-production
checklists are presented to operators prior to allowing job run, and
finally the system makes everything required for production immediately
available to operators.
TRACKING
When jobs are being run, every detail of their movement along the
process and all activities performed upon them are logged. Rework
incidents, re-routings, tuning steps, data collection points, and even
event information acquired from machinery is attached to the product as
it moves through the process. This, once again, is achieved via web
browsers, and access to the resultant information is via browsers as
well.
MONITORING AND QUALITY
Managers and customers have immediate web-access to real-time tracking
data. The location of product, the yield rates, quality parameters,
shipment status, etc. are all available through simple web portals.
PRODUCT GENEALOGY
Product genealogy is available for the entire scope of products from one
serialized component to a PCB and up to a final integration into a large
system of many subassemblies. The input of a serial number from any
component of a given system explodes a hierarchical tree of every
product within that assembly. This information drills down further to
expose the process through which the product proceeded and all
information collected during the process. Customers as well as the
managers of the CEM then have immediate product genealogy access.
COMPETITIVE FUTURE
The application of TransCollaborative Manufacturing Software within the
CEM enterprise will distinguish the next-generation of CEMs. They
benefit from greater customer retention and the ability to acquire more
customers by leveraging the benefits of effective communication between
their company and the customer in their marketing and sales efforts. The
benefits they offer and promote to their customers may be summarized as
follows:
The next generation CEM offers greater value and ultimately lower cost
contracts by facilitating collaborative process-centric producibility
analysis with their customers. The communication of the analysis
results, is simplified via the web.
They convey basic product data between the companies interactively via
the web. Rather than exchange-based solutions, the error checking,
cleaning, and approval processes occur via technology owned by the CEM,
eliminating any middle parties in a traditional ASP model.
The offer a system to let their customer feel more in touch with the
production of their products through browser-based visibility to the set
of information or documentation the CEM wishes to present to them. The
dynamic nature of this information offers them a level of interaction
with the process creating their products which simulates the confidence
they enjoyed when building their own products as an OEM.
When their customer experiences field failure of their products, they
offer instantaneous web-access to full product genealogy down to
component tracing data and process history and all the way up the
product hierarchy to the final assembly level. This closes the loop from
the initial design refinement to the final support of the finished
product in the field.
The next generation CEM use their TCM system to interact digitally with
their customers through the entire process, making their relationship
stronger.
THE ULTIMATE OBJECTIVE
TransCollaborative Manufacturing software has emerged from the many
disparate solutions of the past to provide CEMs a singular system
providing the benefits of centralized web-centric information visibility
for both the CEM and their customers. Its framework creates a digital
dialog with customers while controlling and expediting internal data
preparation and manufacturing execution. Most importantly, TCM
technology helps the CEM attain the most important goals in any
business; customer retention, acquisition, and satisfaction.
Author Information:
Jason Spera, Chief Executive Officer
Aegis Industrial Software Corporation
220 Gibraltar Road, Suite 100
Horsham, PA 19044