Case Study: Rapid scale expansion from single-line to multi-line high volume manufacturing

Intraratio enabled customer’s rapid expansion while simultaneously optimizing their manufacturing operations to meet high growth driven by multiple optical and automotive customer demands.

Introduction:

Intraratio, a world leader in advanced software solutions for managing complex manufacturing environments, provides the only platform known today that can fully integrate Electronics Manufacturing from semiconductor wafer fabrication to chip, including SiPh, through packaging, SMT, to final backend system assembly and test.

The electronics industry is continuing to be challenged with supply chain issues, deeper product traceability requirements, and growing labor constraints.  All while having to manufacture ever more complex products, as exemplified by SiPh integration into more traditional single technology devices, with higher reliability and quality levels, while needing to reduce time-to-market timelines to ensure their competitive advantages. 

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

With higher production output, any single quality or reliability issue represents a significant increase in risk to revenue and company reputation. 

Coupled with rising component costs, and higher dependencies on electronics systems, reliability, performance, and cost need to be addressed through better data collection and decision 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, rapidly, cost-effectively and successfully no matter the data challenges.  Let's dive into a real-world example to see how Intraratio enabled a customer to achieve truly remarkable results.

Challenge: 

A large multi-national Optical Transceiver and Automotive Electronics Manufacturer, faced the critical challenge of rapidly scaling product lines from single to multi-line high volume, in order to meet rapidly increasing market demand.

Critical challenges included the following:

• Customer factory expansion required the ability to rapidly scale with their existing RunCard MES and DataCard YMS platform, and ensure zero downtime of existing product lines when adding new lines.
• Expansion required rapid connectivity and integration with new and legacy assembly and test equipment, as well as other disparate data sources.
• Increased data collection and transaction volumes outpaced available server resources, bandwidth and disk storage, with reporting on larger data sets taking longer.
• IT system downtimes would result in costly output productivity losses, therefore the customer needed the flexibility to upgrade and perform IT maintenance one production line at a time, as opposed to pausing the entire factory.
• Data archiving policies needed to be deployed that supported RMA analysis looking back for up to 10 years on automotive products.
• Corporate IT bureaucracy and inefficiencies resulted in long delays to procure and install additional IT infrastructure (VM’s, disk storage and memory) in a timely manner, leading to high rates of down time, thus adversely impacting revenue attainment and associated operational losses.

Solution: 

The company upgraded to Intraratio's RunCard MES and DataCard YMS hyperscale model for a unified product traceability, analytics, and reporting platform across all production lines.

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

The company can now add additional production lines to the RunCard MES and DataCard YMS platform without needing to pause factory operations.

Figure 1.0: Deployment Topology - Single Line to Hyperscale Cluster Multi-Line

Results:

• Rapid Scalability: RunCard MES and DataCard YMS modular architecture and flexible configuration options allowed for rapid scaling of the platform to accommodate the expanded factory operations.
• Seamless Integration: The platform's robust integration capabilities enabled quick and efficient connectivity with new and legacy assembly and test equipment, as well as other data sources.
• Enhanced Data Handling: RunCard MES and DataCard YMS optimized data handling capabilities, including advanced data compression and efficient database management, effectively addressed the increased data volume and improved reporting performance.
• Phased Deployment: The solution's modular design and phased deployment approach allowed for incremental upgrades and maintenance, minimizing downtime and reducing the impact on overall production.
• Long-Term Data Retention: Advanced data archiving capabilities ensures 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 realized substantial near-term and long-term multi-million dollar savings by standardizing on Intraratio's unified software platform. Unlike traditional approaches that require multiple software systems, Intraratio's ability to go from single license to a multi-license cluster model for managing production operations helped the company eliminate the ongoing expenses associated with maintaining and supporting multiple disparate software systems. 

This remarkable achievement demonstrates the power of Intraratio's solutions in enabling businesses to scale efficiently, capture new market opportunities and associated profitable revenues.

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