For a little PCB prototyping business intent on serving some of the best-known and most respected tech brands on Earth, quick turnaround is much more than just a marketing gimmick – it is really a promise. PCB prototype meeting is by no means a very simple activity, and also small, time consuming hang ups may turn into lost orders and angry customers in an industry where 48-hour turn-arounds are the norm.
In order to be able to reliably produce results on such limited timeframes, PCB assembly plants will need to optimize just about any element of these work flow for speed and consistency. In the centre of this demand is an intrinsic conflict between optimizing the assets and resources you already have or adding additional assets and resources to your own environment.
Essentially, what fast-turnaround PCB fabrication assemblers desire to understand is if or not they should hire additional help and make more use in their machinery, or even buy newer, better machines which may enable them create the most of their existing staff.
Imperfectly Optimized PCB Planning Systems
Before jumping into the matter of if manpower or machine power really produces rapid turn arounds, we need certainly to be sure that the PCB preparation system it self is already performing optimally. Since William Ho maintains, component placement may be the bottle neck of any PCB assembly line.
Essentially, that bottleneck comprises of 2 parts – component sequencing and feeder agreements. PCB producers need to Find the optimal chain of parts then assign them into the appropriate feeders
There are nearly infinite techniques PCB component sequencing and puppy structures can be approached. Choosing the truly most efficient solution is not really achievable at a business context – perhaps not, at least, using current technical technology, and certainly not over a short period.
PCB assemblers on a tight deadline utilize genetic algorithms to find out near-optimal preparation systems without getting lost on the way to this”perfect” solution. While this isn’t just a challenge that can be solved with the modern technology, so it’s crucial to keep in mind that no current PCB assembly procedure is perfectly efficient. This becomes an ever more complicating element for high-volume PCB prototype businesses.
More Machines Means More Establish Up Time
Knowing any PCB assembly procedure must be less than perfectly efficient, so we could turn to time constraints on workflow procedures.
SMT machines aren’t plug and play devices. Better machines require changeovers of at least an hour or so – if you run to ten installments weekly, that means that you are losing an entire day at production time every week.
Change over times could grow to be a enormous dragon production, specially when dealing with tight turnarounds. Time, once lost, cannot be recovered, and every moment of time stored boosts revenue.
Since SMT machines can encounter nearly infinite production possibilities on a single run, and tend to be tasked with making several runs every day, any change over period is downtime. A UIC shows in a very simple pair of graphs in accordance with SMT machine revenue generating time, every second counts an hour or so of downtime for a line that creates $10 million yearly costs $5000.
While there are always methods to enhance the efficiency of a PCB assembly line, there is no way to account fully for about $5000 in unnecessary reductions. Considering that some SMT machines can take up to 4 hours to set up for a single streak of a prototype PCB, making the most of each workday is undoubtedly the better option.
Furthermore, installing additional production lines doesn’t impact the productivity of each individual lineup. While it may appear to increase PCB meeting turnaround, adding more lines and workers may possibly cost more than its worth if overall production volume will not also grow. For this reason, keeping workers late and sometimes even employing an excess shift is undoubtedly the better option.
Night Shifts Could Produce More Worth
Lowering the amount of time each machine can run is your ideal method to guarantee efficiency on short-turnaround PCB meeting projects. Finding workers keen to put in semi – or hiring an whole night shift – is one of the best approaches to make certain you consistently meet assembly deadlines and also minimize downtime.