Automotive SMT Manufacturing Company Accelerates Growth with Intraratio

Intraratio delivers automated SMT line traceability and control for high volume and NPI, resulting in zero dppm capability for a Tier 1 Electronics Manufacturer.

Introduction:

Intraratio, a world leader in advanced software solutions for managing complex electronic manufacturing  operations, provides a rapidly deployable and cost-effective platform that fully digitizes traceability and control for  Surface Mount Technology (SMT)  manufacturing, from initial board serialization through final backend system assembly and test.

The SMT industry continues to be challenged with supply chain issues, access to skilled labor, and ever-growing product traceability regulations and requirements.  Data-driven decision management is key to operational optimization. 

Higher orders of electronics integration, coupled with software and firmware interactions, require increased reliability in the field.  This is particularly acute in the automotive sector, with stringent safety compliance, consumer expectations, and costs related to repairs for electronics recalls and field failures. 

With rising component costs and higher dependencies on electronic systems, reliability, performance, and costs need to be addressed through better data collection and automation.

Intraratio is the correct by-design solution for today's product technology challenges, with the ability to deploy a true Industry 4.0 solution across any size organization cost-effectively, rapidly, and successfully, no matter the data challenges.  Let's dive into a real-world example to see how Intraratio helped a company achieve truly remarkable results.

Challenge: 

A multi-national Tier 1 Electronics Manufacturer with legacy SMT production lines was looking to expand and capture higher margin automotive business, such as advanced driver-assisted systems, wireless communications systems, and related technologies.  This expansion required demonstrating high levels of traceability and control across a broad range of equipment and manual backend processes.

Furthermore, the customer had an aggressive implementation time frame and significant cost constraints, coupled with extensive feature requirements, all of which required the successful vendor to deliver rapid and substantial ROI.

Critical challenges included the following:

• Accelerating line qualification processes to meet customer demands due to the rapidly evolving nature of automotive electronics systems as driven by functional safety requirements.
• Scaling new product introduction (NPI) to high-volume production rapidly within the same operations platform.
• Implementing real-time yield monitoring with automated controls to quarantine defective products, components, or processes to enable rapid root cause capabilities.
• Identifying and eliminating bottlenecks in the production process to improve and maximize overall efficiency.
• Gathering and analyzing relevant data to identify areas for improvement and make informed decisions.
• Implementing rapid change management on production lines to accommodate different product configurations and variations.
• Monitoring global production lines in real-time to proactively detect and address issues.
• Integrating with existing ERP system for automated inventory cost controls.

Solution: 

After a deeply comprehensive evaluation process that included global competitors like Siemens, Dassault Systems, Rockwell Automation, 42-Q, and Honeywell, Intraratio was selected as the supplier of preference to achieve the company’s goals. 

The company deployed Intraratio's RunCard MES and DataCard YMS hyperscale solution to achieve a unified product traceability, analytics, and reporting platform across multiple production lines.

Intraratio’s hyperscale deployment required only low-cost commodity Linux servers to enable distributed computing and load balancing, resulting in data redundancy and automated failover to ensure virtually zero factory production downtime.

Deployment was completed in less than 3 months, with production line build qualifications starting immediately afterward.  Deployment requirements included seamless integration with major equipment brands.  In some cases, Intraratio provided software guidance and expertise to these equipment suppliers to enable better data automation and connectivity.

The company continues to add additional production lines utilizing Intraratio’s RunCard MES and DataCard YMS hyperscale platform.

Figure 1 - SMT Production Line Deployment

Figure 2 - Assembly Equipment Integrations

Figure 3- Test Equipment Integrations

Figure 4 - Label Scan & Print Integrations

Figure 5 - Custom Interface Integrations

Figure 6 - ERP Integration

Results:

• Rapid Customer Growth: The company successfully captured business from two of the largest Global Automotive Manufacturers with high margins and profitability.
• Competitive Advantage: Faster time-to-market with higher quality products positioned the company to win additional business from multiple Tier 1 Global Automotive Manufacturers.
• Enhanced Supply Chain Control: Enabled company to mitigate product quality and delivery risks by utilizing serialized traceability across all inventory and finished goods.
• Real-time Visibility:  Gained unparalleled visibility and control with real-time data capture and processing of traceability information, machine settings, and sensor/IoT data.
• Increased Efficiency: Streamlined processes and efficient resource utilization allowed the company to operate more effectively. It also enabled the company to optimize production processes, reduce downtime, and increase overall productivity, enabling our customer to scale operations seamlessly.
• Improved Quality: Enhanced statistical process control (SPC), utilizing advanced analytics for detecting variability, enabled automated identification and isolation of affected product and inventory for immediate engineering analysis.
• Faster Time-to-Market: Significantly reduced new product introduction (NPI) cycle times allowed our customer to get their product to market faster than their competition with fully optimized product performance. 
• Long-Term Data Retention: Advanced data archiving capabilities ensure the secure and efficient storage of critical production data for decades, facilitating comprehensive RMA analysis and compliance with the most stringent of industry regulations.
• Reduced IT Dependency: RunCard MES and DataCard YMS cloud-native architecture and minimal hardware requirements reduced the reliance on corporate IT, accelerating deployment and minimizing downtime due to infrastructure limitations.

Outcome, ROI:

The manufacturer successfully leveraged Intraratio's RunCard MES and DataCard YMS platform to achieve rapid growth and global expansion, starting with a single automotive production line. Immediately following that success, the company expanded its services to six of the largest automotive manufacturers worldwide. This remarkable achievement demonstrates the power of Intraratio's solutions to enable efficient scaling, capture new market opportunities, and tremendously decrease time-to-market for a company of any size.

Ready to scale your production? Please contact us now to learn more about our platform that transforms your factory.