Book Excerpt: The Printed Circuit Assembler’s Guide to... Factory Analytics

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The Printed Circuit Assembler’s Guide to... Factory Analytics: Unlocking Efficiency Through Data Insights

Introduction

Factory Analytics Drive the Future of Electronics Manufacturing
Using and understanding factory analytics is the future for electronics manufacturers—this can’t be overstated enough. Manufacturers who strategically prioritize analytics and properly leverage the insights generated throughout their entire operation systematically will be those that stand the test of time. In this fast-changing, deeply competitive, and margin-tight industry, factory analytics can be the key to unlocking untapped improvements to guarantee a thriving business.

Electronics manufacturers today are facing a tremendous burden to do more with less. Sustainability initiatives, geopolitical uncertainty, high interest rates, on- and near-shoring pressures, skilled workforce gaps, IT security demands, and cost pressures (to name a few…) are requiring manufacturers to get the absolute most out of their current infrastructure. It’s no longer as simple as adding another line or building a new factory in an affordable geographical location to assemble more products and meet increasing demands. And the best way to make the most out of what you already have is to properly understand and analyze how it's actually performing.

The leading manufacturers are turning to factory analytics to clearly understand operational efficiency and performance. They’re using software on the manufacturing floor to gain visibility on what’s happening in real-time as well as to better understand what happened historically to improve for the future. With rich data analyses at their fingertips, these manufacturers have leveraged substantial cost savings by running a more efficient, timely, and thus less wasteful, and less expensive operation. The factory analytics business case really speaks for itself: manufacturers can tap into tremendous cost savings, quality improvements, enhanced margins, reduced scrap, and improved on-time delivery rates.

Choosing the right analytics tool can be arduous; there are hundreds of commercial and private options out there. For the larger electronics manufacturers, developing analytics internally was originally the preferred way to go, but in the last three or so years, many of those same manufacturers are turning to third party developed solutions due to the complexity and heavy maintenance required.

It's easy to get distracted by a pretty book cover, and the same can be said for an analytics tool. But, while aesthetics are important, when selecting an analytics platform, one of the most important considerations should be given to the domain expertise of the development company. For electronics manufacturers, this is even more critical given the complexity of this industry; visualizing the data is only one element of an analytics platform and to do that meaningfully you need access to the data and a way to enrich it appropriately (contextualize and normalize) to perform relevant calculations.

Additionally, electronics manufacturers need a robust analytics solution with minimal latency. In this fast-paced environment, timely decision-making is paramount, and users need access to the most current and relevant factory insights. The underlying analytics platform architecture should be aggregated in such a way that the data is always available (as in, not susceptible to crashing) and in real-time. A robust solution will be designed to handle large volumes of factory data efficiently, preventing bottlenecks and slowdowns to ensure smooth operation while still maintaining the responsiveness of the analytics platform, even during peak usage.

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