Maximizing electronics manufacturing operations performance with a smart factory

What’s a smart factory? A smart factory is a fully digitalized factory model representing a production system – connecting product lifecycle management (PLM) data to supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and other automation. For electronics companies, the breakthrough strengths and technologies of the smart factory include shop-floor connectivity, advanced robotics, flexible automation, automation standards, virtual and augmented reality and energy management. Smart factories are highly efficient – saving energy, time and resources.

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An electronics smart factory offers complete shop-floor connectivity

A cloud-based manufacturing operations management (MOM) system collects information from resources, enabling manufacturers to maximize operations performance. With shop floor insight, teams can provide much better and more adaptive factory maintenance systems and processes, thus ensuring high uptime and better productivity.

Information collected during production from the process, part, product and production resources is shared with the product design and manufacturing planning departments. The information helps to improve the product, make the manufacturing process more robust, and help the production management personnel identify best practices by comparing production processes in different plants around the globe.

Smart factory and systems maximize electronics manufacturing shop floors

The shop floor is an integral part of the digital thread, using one communication and automation standard for all manufacturing technologies, allowing plug-and-play configuration and use. Smart factories use integrated monitoring to allow for a self-adjusting decision-making process. The information rendered by the digital thread is studied and analyzed using artificial intelligence (AI) technology, and its main findings are sent back to product development, manufacturing planning or facility planning.