Profiting from interconnected, automatic data collection and detailed workflow documentation during PCB manufacturing

Exacting medical equipment industry demands

Manufacturing printed circuit boards (PCBs) requires precision, perfect duplication, high speeds, expert raw and rare material management and flexibility. This includes using robots and specialized, high tech equipment to work holistically on dedicated batches in changeable production lines. The entire process demands exacting accuracy, experts and fine-tuned processes without forgetting about sourcing and delivering those expensive raw materials and high tech components.

Now apply this to the highly regulated and exacting medical equipment industry. If you think there is a lot of complexity in the PCBs that run your smart phone or laptop, just imagine the scrutiny required for medical PCBs running a computed tomography (CT) scanner, ultrasound machine, photon scanner or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine.

To ensure safe and reliable patient care, onboard medical PCBs must meet a plethora of strict standards and regulations, including Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Conformity (CE) approval. In addition to lists of health and safety factors (thermal management restraints and electromagnetic interference (EMI) issues), regulations also include standards for how a manufacturer designs and builds the medical PCB itself.

"We produce thousands of medical PCBs and components for all types of Siemens Healthineers equipment,” says Jochen Raaber, production scheduler at Siemens Healthineers, which is headquartered in Erlangen, Germany. “Every PCB needs to meet exacting quality standards. As PCB production planners, our job is to make sure that we have the right materials at the right location on time. These are the challenges we have nowadays.”

To overcome these challenges, the PCB production planners at Siemens Healthineers leveraged Opcenter™ Scheduling Surface Mount Technology (SMT) software, which is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

Turning complexity into a competitive advantage

The planning team at Siemens Healthineers needs to handle various products and customer requirements with varying degrees of PCB complexity according to the final medical equipment specifications. With a continually changing scheduling environment, just-in-time (JIT) delivery, production delivery deadlines and raw material and component shortages, it is crucial to create an advantage from changes in complex processes.

“We found that to succeed, we needed to be more process-based than product-based,” explains Florian Funke, production scheduler at Siemens Healthineers. “It is one of the key reasons we turned to the Opcenter team and its dedicated solution for SMT scheduling and planning.”

A core part of medical PCB manufacturing is SMT, which is an assembly technique where components are attached and connected to the PCB’s surface using batch soldering processes. The connections between the planner and the shop floor need to work well to achieve this outcome.

Previously, the planning team used a highly customized spreadsheet for assembly to shop floor planning. As experts, they found they could make the right calls based on experience. However, they knew they could improve by leveraging a better tool. One tool they tested using was the Opcenter Scheduling SMT software.

“What we liked about using Opcenter Scheduling SMT is that it covers all our job’s basics, like the production schedules, the frequency, the real-time changes when it comes to new products or short runs and the documentation capabilities, which are important in the medical equipment industry,” says Funke. “But where we really saw value were improvements in our big picture work order workflow. Now this was very interesting for us.”

Integrating SAP and ASM

Siemens Healthineers used Opcenter Scheduling SMT to tailor new features for automatically pulling data from three important workflow sources. This includes: 1) machinery, line configurations and resource availability from the shop floor; 2) work orders, schedules and work hours from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system (in this case, SAP) and 3) material availability and location from the supply chain systems.

The team recently completed an SAP integration to publish XML work order data directly for PCB manufacturing. Using Opcenter Scheduling SMT automatically picks up files and processes the work orders with minimal effort from the planning team. After this success, the team was curious to see how Opcenter could be leveraged to handle a new process work-flow for a new product.

“When it comes to introducing PCBs for new products, we don’t need to do much,” says Funke. “With Opcenter, you don’t need to hunt down data from other sources, which used to take hours or even days if something was lost or not interconnected. Using Opcenter Scheduling SMT, everything is interconnected. We just select similar products, parts and component data directly from our ASM software. Leveraging Opcenter automatically picks up all the required data from SAP and the ASM. It loads all the lists in about a minute. This is an extremely quick way to get the missing product data for a new product.”

"Because all our data is aggregated in a single place within our Opcenter process, we don’t waste time fetching it from various sources,” says Raaber. “The data we use now is purpose-built for us and in one single place, which is optimal for our scheduling team.”

Increasing flexibility

Planners at Siemens Healthineers were also happy to learn they could use Opcenter Scheduling SMT to automatically assign work orders to individual lines with its factory schedule optimizer, Multiline, including aligning the work orders by grouping and sequencing.

“Compared to other solutions, using Opcenter Scheduling SMT is far more flexible,” says Raaber. “You can customize it exactly as you need it for the most complex production scheduling.”

The team can even tailor optimization criteria to its exact SMT and production line needs. This covers vital scheduling criteria, like production time, group count, due dates, missing parts, etc.

“We work with fixed groups and setups,” says Funke. “The tool does a lot of the work for us. Using it puts everything automatically in the correct setup and quickly assigns everything to the correct line according to the work order or product. We just check it. There is very little manual retrieval these days. We can comfortably work with a team of two on a shift, whereas in the past we needed three people on the floor to get the job done right.”

Improving downtime

The goal is to optimize the overall production process because downtime can hinder the most organized teams. Siemens Healthineers planners hoped to use Opcenter to reduce downtime and optimize production batches. As the recent global chip shortage and supply chain issues demonstrated, the more they can analyze and compensate for unexpected events, like a shipment stuck in transit or a shortage of standard chips or copper, the easier it is for Siemens Healthineers to meet on-time delivery commitments within their production environments.

“When we do have to make a tricky decision because of a supply chain issue or other unexpected event, using Opcenter lets us simulate and compare different scenarios,” says Funke. “We can even input our expertise and preferences by adding weight to the various criteria. Then we just choose the options and schedule that work best for overall production.”

“The software adapts to what is coming in the production process and leaves us with the flexibility to make the right informed choices,” says Raaber. “I think this is the key strength of leveraging Opcenter Scheduling SMT.”

The team at the Erlangen plant was up and running with ease after three days of installation support and hands-on training. They can use Opcenter Scheduling SMT to do the busy work, from importing orders from SAP and other sources to optimizing the SMT groupings for best-case changeover to flagging PCB production issues, including material availability. Additionally, leveraging the Opcenter Scheduling SMT what-if analysis capability is handy in a constantly changing world where Siemens Healthineers’ high tech production expectations require accurate, practical, on-the-fly scheduling expertise.