data

Scores on the EMS doors: how real-time data dashboards drive service levels and operational efficiencies

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If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
Peter Drucker, Management Consultant

The most successful EMS operations are those which combine the mass delivery and rigidity of automation with the intelligence and flexibility of those programming the machines.
Stewart Gadd, Technical Director, Chemigraphic

Not all perfect storms are a bad thing.

In electronic manufacturing today there is a cluster of trends coalescing to offer us unprecedented levels of information and intelligence about fluctuations in every aspect of our increasingly complex business.

This perfect storm is delivering instant insight into:

  • Our supply chain
  • The traceability of components through – and beyond – our production operations
  • The efficiencies of our manufacturing process
  • Ways to reduce error, ensure consistency and increase yield

It is being whipped up by a number of related trends:

  • The Internet of Things’ (IoT) offers us increasingly integrated data across all of our tech
  • Cloud computing delivers the capacity to store and analyse large amounts of this data
  • Automation delivers time-savings and efficiencies in both completing and reporting on tasks
  • Barcoding and scanning technology allows us to accurately monitor and trace components and activities at a granular level

At the very eye of this storm, however, lies the ability to act on all this available data and intelligence as quickly as it is being produced.

Without this ability to quickly reach informed decisions, electronic manufacturers will not be riding the waves to optimal efficiency but instead, drowning under a deluge of data.

And it is the use of data-driven dashboards that is the differentiator between sinking and swimming.

From information to intelligence

John Greenough, senior research analyst at Business Insider (BI) Intelligence, estimates that the number of IoT devices used by manufacturers will have exceeded one billion by 2020, with annual investments scaling up to $70 billion.

IoT investment

Source

Manufacturers, more than any other sector, are leading the adoption of IoT. There are sound commercial reasons for this: according to a TATA Consultancy Survey, manufacturers have seen a higher return on investment from the IoT than any other industry.

Chemigraphic have long used IoT solutions to track assets in our factories, consolidate our control rooms, monitor performance, reduce errors, optimise efficiencies and increase our analytics functionality through predictive maintenance.

But as more data becomes available across our entire manufacturing operation, the key to realising further efficiencies and quality improvements lies in how – and how quickly – we act upon all this business intelligence.

It is critical that this advanced intelligence is being viewed and acted upon in real-time: we must have an at-a-glance way to assess the sheer complexity of production and supply chain factors that affect our yields and reliability.

To do this we need to have access to data that has been configured to address customers’ specific requirements. And we need to intuitively grasp high-level information about what is happening on the shop floor – and to be able to easily drilldown into each stage of the manufacturing process if required.

  • We need the granularity to trace a batch of components, monitor a machine or review a technician’s progress
  • We need the overview to schedule tasks and switch job runs
  • And we need automatically generated (machine) intelligence reports that are distributed appropriately to highlight any variances or optimisation potentials that arise

Dashboards

Real-time data-driven dashboards at Chemigraphic

At Chemigraphic, we know the difference such real-time data-driven dashboards make.

Dashboards are displayed across our company, in every department from factory operations to sales, purchasing and procurement.

  • They are colour-coded, user-friendly and instantly readable, making it easy to identify and react to issues as they arise in real-time
  • They are an enhancement of our automated processes, helping link together our data collection, barcoding and traceability. All job numbers are barcoded – and all employees have barcodes – so jobs can be monitored and data can be isolated or collated as needed
  • They are an essential part of our commitment to customer service, realising time and cost efficiencies, driving performance, ensuring quality, maintaining responsibility and offering traceability
  • They allow us to:
    • Provide training and support to be given to staff who are encountering delays on a job
    • Ensure a smooth workflow by lining up jobs for those who are nearing a project’s completion
    • Spot trends and variances whether positive or negative, to ensure future improvements
    • Retrospectively check customer or project data against exact timestamps to identify issues or performance markers

The scores on the doors for dashboards

A recent Aberdeen Group study into Manufacturing Operations Benchmarks confirms what we discover every day as we use real-time analysis to prevent problems, guarantee reliability and drive cost-efficient optimisations.

Here’s what it discovered from a survey of 223 organisations at the cutting edge of manufacturing services:

  • About a third of these handled plant data via real-time/event-driven dashboards with role-based data accessibility, navigation, aggregation and drill down
  • Real-time operational dashboard users were twice as likely to have visibility of critical real-time areas such as quality, compliance, global operations and processes

 improve real-time visibility

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  • Because of this visibility, 71 percent of dashboard users have the ability to collect, plan and schedule, aggregate, analyse and respond to real-time manufacturing events − nearly three times the rate of non-users
  • They also have improved their time-to-decision at a rate 5 times greater than non-users

Dashboards lie at the centre of a perfect storm

Commenting on the role of automation, data collection and real-time analysis in driving our business, Stewart Gadd, our Technical Director, affirmed that:

‘Chemigraphic relies on the strength and insight provided by the data network that runs throughout the company.

Collecting, analysing and acting on data, whether it relates to customer purchases, productivity levels of staff or the efficiency of internal systems, is vital in measuring and improving our overall performance.

By tracking spikes, dips and other trends in the data we collect across the business, we can start to make observations on what is working well, what needs to change and successes we need to celebrate and champion.’

We intend to stay right at the centre of this perfect storm.

Mind the gap! Small data variations may suggest big problems

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Quality measurement plays a pivotal role in helping drive stability, prosperity and growth – and that’s good for everybody, especially in these uncertain times. Within the details of quality data are small differences – gaps – between predicted and actual results, and a thorough examination of these gaps, even relatively small ones, can point to wider issues of commercial management. Minding these ‘gaps’ goes beyond just collecting quality metrics and conformance data, it’s about getting to the root cause in order to be operationally-efficient and ultimately sustainable, with all the benefits this brings to customers.

We’ll look at a few areas where a rigorous ‘mind the gap’ ethos within commercial management can deliver clear customer advantages.

Scrappy data leads to higher costs

Scrap is the commonly used term for what’s rejected as “non-compliant” after a production job. The usual issues are damaged or faulty items, which can be blatant, but can also include less tangible issues as borderline tolerance issues, temperature or time-dependent failures, failures under one set of circumstances but not another identical situation, and subjective defects, especially cosmetic imperfections. Companies may absorb scrap as an inevitable cost of manufacturing but failing to at least track and investigate the causes of scrap can be a lost opportunity to identify a number of issues: inefficient manufacturing processes, supplier problems, inappropriate or poorly applied acceptability criteria, tooling issues, manual and handling issues or even poor documentation.

We make sure that even relatively small value materials are quarantined and go to a Material Review Board (MRB) that consists of sales, quality, purchasing and production, where a joint decision is made on disposition. The MRB asks questions like:

  • What’s the root cause of this material being segregated and quarantined?
  • Are defects physically repairable? Will the result be fully compliant? Will the repair be acceptable to customer? If not, will the customer concede in this instance. Should we instigate a new repair process?
  • Is there an underlying defect in supplied materials and can this be compensated by the supplier?
  • Is a material truly non-conforming or just sub-optimal? Is the acceptability criteria properly defined and applied?
  • What is the repair cost vs replacement cost vs item value? Are there other strategic reasons for extra efforts for recovery in this instance, e.g. to complete a consignment; no time to source alternatives; a one-off build is inefficient, or other reasons.
  • Is this incidence part of a trend? i.e. the individual part value may be insignificant, but the ongoing accumulated cost could be substantial.
  • Is this incidence an indicator of a wider or more systemic problem? Will the benefits of a corrective action improve capability in other areas?

This MRB process also helps to ensure that standards are correctly interpreted.

Scrapping not only has a direct effect on materials used in production and costs money but there’s time and labour spent dealing with the disposition. Monitoring the scrap data provides opportunities to build leaner manufacturing processes by looking at:

  • Who is handling the materials and how frequently?
  • What are the costs of scrapped materials?
  • Can any parts be salvaged for reuse of return?

Longer job times can actually lead to better business

Every production job has a job time. These may vary enormously – and even on repeat builds job time can vary depending on which operators have been assigned and the batch size. Typically, we put a traffic light system in place to monitor the data. From a commercial management perspective, it’s important to focus on growth and stability and ask questions around the red and amber lights:

  • Why did that job make nothing?
  • Is that a continual loss making job?
  • Was there an excessive amount of scrap on the job?
  • Did we over-run time?
  • Where did that cost occur?

Growth and stability improvements are typically made not from simply replicating sales in the best performing customers but looking at the bottom performing jobs and addressing those issues. By collecting quality data over a long time, it’s possible to determine whether there’s exceptional circumstances or a persistent problem.

The return of the return

Returns under warranty happen for lots of reasons. Where a product doesn’t function in the intended manner due to a fault then it is clear the responsibility lies with the manufacturer and it is their liability to fix the problem. However, a product may ping-pong back and forth between manufacturer and supplier before somebody intervenes to halt the process. By then there may be limited options, having been inspected by both parties without anybody accepting liability. In these instances it remains very important to maintain accurate detailed data.  There might be an underlying quality defect – a board might be delaminating after the components are mounted, for instance. This would be an issue of the materials supplied and in these instances it might be appropriate to address issues of compensation with suppliers.

The age of returns is critical too. Within the complex and fast-paced transactions of a modern manufacturing environment, materials can be put aside for a variety of reasons. Over time the pile can accumulate. When someone eventually addresses this pile of returns, the original reasons for the segregations may be lost and it can be tempting to simply return the goods to the supplier.

Detailed quality data generates lots of opportunities to improve a process. Being mindful of the small gaps in quality data makes a big difference in the long run.

Four critical questions to ask your EMS provider about your data’s security

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We live in a connected world.

The Internet of Things (IoT), the ubiquity of data and the Fourth Industrial Revolution deliver gains in productivity and efficiency through connections across the manufacturing sector.

Yet the same connections that strengthen us could also weaken us: as our shared data becomes more powerful it could prove to be our Achilles heel.

And it’s the weak link in the chain that hackers are increasingly keen to exploit.

The importance of security for electronic manufacturing

Recent concerns have highlighted how security threats could derail the application and uptake of IoT.

A study released by Hewlett-Packard discovered that 70% of the most commonly used IoT devices contain at least some vulnerabilities.

A review of these breaches led a contributor to New Electronics to bemoan that ‘vendors are repeatedly failing to apply simple security best practise and are exposing their customers to attack.’

The article goes on to list ten common security breaches, among which it includes issues with the hardware itself.

  • Unnecessary functions such as debug ports are left in place creating potential routes in for hackers.
  • Devices are under-utilising security mechanisms such as BGA (Ball Grid Array) packages which, when combined with good PCB design, make it harder to tap into signals.

But these concerns about security are not just about the end-products but can be found in the manufacturing process itself.

Here are some of the stories that have hit the headlines in the last few years:

  • Electronics manufacturer Foxconn was breached by a hacktivist group that released every employee’s login information.
  • Boeing was compromised repeatedly for four years by foreign nationalists trying to steal defence program manufacturing plans.
  • In Japan, Korea and Germany manufacturers have been targeted by hackers, believed to be from China, trying to access IP data, trade secrets and blueprints.

And here’s a story that did not make quite such a big splash but is even more alarming.

  • 48% of UK manufacturers have been subject to a cyber-attack – and half of these businesses suffered either financial loss or disruption to business as a result.
  • Manufacturing is now the third-most targeted sector for attacks by hackers.

These shocking statistics are from a report on cyber-security for manufacturers, published by EEF and AIG and carried out by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

It goes on to suggest that this threat will only deepen with increasing digitisation – and notes that 91% of manufacturers are investing in digital technologies.

The report also found that across the manufacturing sector cyber security maturity levels are ‘highly varied’ both in terms of awareness of the cyber security challenge and the implementation of appropriate risk mitigation measures.

Which suggests there are many weak links in the supply chain out there.

Critical questions to ask your EMS provider

The good news for electronic manufacturers is that GDPR has helped to focus minds. Manufacturers are increasingly willing to question their suppliers to ensure adequate security procedures are in place.

The EFF/AIG report found that 58% of manufacturers have been asked to demonstrate or guarantee the robustness of their cyber-security processes by a business within their own supply chain.

Worryingly, 42% haven’t.

And of even more concern is that 37% of manufacturers admitted they would be unable to do this if asked today.

If you are looking for an EMS provider to partner with here are four critical questions you should ask about their security arrangements.

(We’ve provided our own answers after each one.)

1/ How do you ensure the security of your customer’s product data?

  • Our data is stored in a protected area that has restricted access.
  • Data is only ever distributed on a need to know basis.
  • Our network has strict access controls, with verification required at each level of security.
  • We do not outsource any area of your PCB assembly – to ensure there is no risk of compromise from this.
  • We manage our supply chain robustly, establishing long-term relationships and always ensuring Non-Disclosure Agreements are in place where needed.

2/ How do you ensure security on-site?

  • Our site has controlled access – this extends to each facility and internal area.
  • We carefully manage any contractors on site – access to customer data is never granted to anyone not employed by Chemigraphic.
  • The data itself is stored in a vault storage.
  • We have access-controlled IT server rooms.

3/ How do you manage your supply chain to ensure data security?

  • As the outsourced manufacturing partner to our customers, we take full responsibility for the entire manufacturing process and the management of any suppliers and materials within it.
  • We source excellent materials using only reputable partners.
  • We have enhanced inspection and qualification procedures for new parts to minimise the risk of counterfeit parts with security feature defects or malicious designs.
  • We undertake supplier site security audits if necessary – especially for overseas suppliers.
  • All employees and contractors are thoroughly screened.
  • If you prefer, we can work only from UK sources.
  • We discretely manage customer information, including the restriction of signage and non-publicity clauses etc.
  • We offer segregated materials storage and build areas – and we can provide a dedicated restricted-access area for security-conscious customers.

4/ Can you show me an example of a project of yours that had high security requirements?

Sure.

This case study of our work with a cyber-security sector customer is just one example of a project we’ve delivered where customer data and through processes were highly important.

Ask us about your data’s security with us

Everything we do is governed by robust processes. These are designed to meet exacting standards of security while delivering optimal efficiency and consistently excellent results.

We believe that through intelligent planning, proper process and strict control, anything can be achieved.

If you’d like to know more about how we ensure your data is safe and secure with us, don’t hesitate to ask or take a look at why we stand out from the crowd.