Implementation of remote monitoring system in printed circuit board assembly equipment

Abstract

In capital intensive factories and manufacturing lines, the penalty for downtime for any individual piece of manufacturing equipment is very high, not only in lost production, but also in potentially undetected problems in in-process inventory. Early detection of problems, preferably before they become serious, and rapid response to repair or compensate are a high priority for all manufacturing facilities. Real time monitoring of the manufacturing equipment and process is now possible due to the increased amounts of instrumentation and networking capabilities provided by equipment vendors. However, the large amounts of data that manufacturing equipment can now provide can be overwhelming for data analysis, the networking infrastructure, and the data handling ability of the database. The objective of this project is to implement remote monitoring capability in a specific manufacturing facility to demonstrate how to determine which variables are of most importance, how to use that data, and how much benefit can be provided by the addition of the monitoring capability. The printed circuit board assembly area of the North Penn Electronics Facility was selected as the target of this study. A system to monitor the component pick performance of the individual feeders on the surface mount pick and place machines was developed. This system was implemented into the plant using a subset of the features specified on the original design. The monitoring system has been tested, and results indicate that more complete statistical process control rules as specified in the original design are needed to fully address the component scrap and machine downtime issues.