Traceability to drive extended MES adoption
1 min read
Manufacturing execution systems (MESs) will rise faster up the business agenda, particularly in electronic and electrical assembly shops, as companies are forced to rise to the challenge of traceability for regulatory compliance.
So says Jason Spera, CEO and co-founder of extended MES developer Aegis Industrial Software Corporation. “Traceability is a super set of RoHS [Restriction of Hazardous Substances]. Regulatory demands for declaring the record of assembly and the material content of everything could prove to be a costly challenge for the industry.”
He says that the during last 18 months alone there has been “a surprising upswing” in the demands for new levels of traceability. “Now, we are delivering systems that take care of this through real time data acquired from the machines for every critical parameter possible,” he says.
Spera believes MESs will continue to evolve to meet this growing demand, resulting in “a level of process integration, control and data management that is considered normal in the semiconductor industry, to migrate into electronics assembly.” And for that to happen he expects machine vendors and software providers to work closer together.
“This is why Aegis built the xLink data acquisition technology in conjunction with the machine vendors,” he says. “We see it as the first movement towards attaining this goal. Rather than trying to append things to the machine and compete with the machine vendors, we work with them. Customers are beginning to want total factory information systems and we intend to be their solution.”
And with Aegis’ background in MES and new product introduction (NPI) for electronics assembly – taking data from design labs – the company is in a good position to develop what is required.
“This is something MES systems simply do not normally encompass,” says Spera. “It is absolutely critical to delivering what customers need today. We convert the CAD design and the BoM [bill of materials] into a full product routing, create visual aids automatically, generate and optimise all machine programs, set-up logic decisions for quality, repair loop automation and test.
“Essentially, we prepare all the data needed to produce a product properly and to drive the MES system, including the bill of process for shop floor material control. The product-intelligent data model this populates in our system is a significant reason why Aegis MES is so much more capable than competitive offerings.”
