Production data under control – and always available!

With around 1.2 million PCBs produced a year across more than 3,000 orders, Assmy & Böttger Electronic, A+B Electronic for short, covers the entire production spectrum from sample quantities and small batches to large volumes. “Orders with small quantities require just as much preparation work as large series,” says Technical Director Mr Haake. The time needed to check and prepare customer data, create production documents, procure and provide components and program the production machines remains consistently high – regardless of the actual number of assemblies to be produced in an order.

Mr Haake therefore followed the live demonstration of the EFA software solution at the “JUKI meets friends” user meeting at the beginning of the year with great interest. LEBERT Software Engineering presented its EFA SmartSuite there. Within a very short time, placement data was set up in EFA Processing – a fundamental part of the EFA SmartSuite solution – and was available for further processing.

“The potential of EFA SmartSuite is best demonstrated live with the customer's own data. With their own process in mind, many EMS providers can immediately grasp the time savings and the standardisation,” says Ms Lebert of LEBERT Software Engineering.

EFA Processing delivers the decisive time advantage

Mr Haake immediately recognised the direct benefit for his own work preparation, and so a positive decision to use the EFA SmartSuite solution at A+B Electronic was quickly taken. The entire work preparation process is now carried out exclusively with EFA Processing – right through to generating a master data set of placement data for production.

“Besides time savings of more than 50% in work preparation, this method offers additional reliability when cross-checking customer data, which suits our high quality standards very well,” says Mr Haake.

The time saved makes it possible to process more orders in the same time and thus increase overall productivity, and at the same time it can be put to good use for better production planning, material procurement and early preparation of production.

“In addition to the enormous time savings, we have also standardised our production documents,” reports Mr Haake. “As a side effect, the workflows are of course standardised too. This has a direct impact on the subsequent production steps in our plant.”

Very simple operation with an enormous range of functions

EMS providers usually receive their customers' production data in non-standardised, constantly changing formats. The first task is therefore to check this customer data quickly and reliably, match it against their own part number lists and prepare a quotation from it. Once an order has been received, the production documents have to be generated and the data prepared for the machines.

EFA Processing delivers the decisive time advantage for this process: data can be imported in almost any format (EFA understands more than 200 different image and data formats) and then exported again specifically for the respective production machines. Not only is the data format of the customer data irrelevant to the process; integrating BoM lists, linking lists – for example to match customer part numbers with the company's own part numbers – or even editing the assembly drawing can all be done centrally with EFA Processing. Despite this wide range of functions, EFA Processing is easy and intuitive to use. The wizard concept makes it possible to provide a high degree of functional flexibility while combining it with the simplest possible handling.

“Even users who have been away from the company for a long time due to holidays or illness must be able to get back into using the software quickly and intuitively,” says Mr Lebert, Managing Director of LEBERT Software Engineering, describing the requirements for the operating concept of EFA SmartSuite.

Other key features of EFA Processing include generating panel data for the placement machines and managing assembly variants. This data, too, can be exported for the respective production machines. Templates can be set up that contain the format specifications required by the machines, such as separators or column order, as presets.

Time savings and quality secured

In addition to EFA Processing, A+B Electronic – which in July obtained medical certification in accordance with EN ISO 13485:2003+AC:2009 and risk management certification to 14971:2009 – also uses the EFA Inspection® inspection solution and the EFA viewer. The data set up by work preparation can be opened as projects and used in all other EFA applications with a single click. This makes it possible to carry out a computer-aided first article inspection without any additional time. With time savings of up to 85% compared with purely manual inspection, EFA Inspection® ensures a fast and reliable inspection process with complete documentation at the same time.

By using EFA Inspection®, A+B Electronic has been able to drastically reduce line downtime. First article inspection is now “faster, more precise and documented in writing by a report”.

Generating an inspection report in particular is required for further certifications, for example the aerospace and automotive certifications that A+B Electronic is currently seeking.

A+B Electronic now uses EFA SmartSuite at a total of 14 workstations. Production releases are carried out directly at each line after the first assembly has been inspected, even before soldering. Thanks to the speed of EFA Inspection®, line downtime can be reduced further while expensive and time-consuming rework processes are avoided in the event of a placement error.

A+B Electronic also uses EFA Inspection® for the optical inspection of small batches.

“With a quantity of, say, 10 boards, using an AOI is not viable in terms of time because of the relatively complex programming,” says Mr Haake, describing the advantage of EFA Inspection® for small batch inspection.

The EFA Viewer makes it possible to access the EFA projects that have been set up at the production machines as well. Information – for example, locating components on the board quickly and easily, combined with the relevant component information – is available on the spot and speeds up the production process for good. If, for instance, there is uncertainty during line programming about which package a component should have or about its polarity, the operator can obtain the missing information with a simple click. There is no longer any need for lengthy searches in printed lists or assembly plans.

Mr Haake even expects that “with this tool, printed production documents can ultimately soon be dispensed with entirely.”

EFA SmartSuite: a complete solution that accompanies the entire process

EFA SmartSuite is a complete solution that accompanies the entire process, supporting all of production from work preparation to final inspection with applications developed specifically for this purpose. In addition to EFA Processing for work preparation, the SmartSuite currently comprises EFA Inspection®, on the market since 2009, for the optical inspection of first articles, prototypes and small batches, as well as the EFA Viewer.

Further applications such as EFA Repair for the targeted and documented repair of defective assemblies and EFA Pick & Place, the guided solution for manual assembly processes, will be available shortly.

EFA SmartSuite is a “living” system that has grown directly out of the many and varied requests of our customers and is regularly extended with new solutions to our customers' problems.

“The customer sets the direction, so that the software is created for the customer,” says Mr Lebert, Managing Director of LSE.