Case Study: EMS company Assel turns to IT solution to reach manufacturing goals
Case Study: EMS company Assel
turns to IT solution to reach
manufacturing goals
Assel is a growing mid tier EMS company In short, Mr. Prolejko’s vision is to “use IT panelization/fabrication drawings are
headquartered near Gdansk, Poland. to build a mid tier EMS company that can neutralized into one manufacturing-
To achieve business development goals, compete favorably with tier one companies focused data structure. The data structure
Assel management concluded they on the basis of expertise, plus out perform is BOM-centric, so the manufacturing
must overcome the natural barriers and tier one giants in customer service and data synchronizes with ERP outputs. This
limitations of a mid tier size company. reaction time to customer needs.” In creates an early advantage of streamlining
These typical limitations, including slow a shrinking global economy where the the data preparation process.
and redundant work flows for AOI and batch size of production runs are getting
SMT programming and component library smaller and smaller, the high efficiency and Data validation
development, lead to sluggish customer flexibility created by Prolejko’s vision is Product engineers rely on the system’s
response time and slow NPI cycles. These paying off in a number of ways. part library to help identity BOM errors
technology limitations build up barriers and footprint, or land pattern, errors very
to successful competition with tier one reduced time to process Npi quickly prior to first run (Figure 1). The
suppliers for production volumes within The company is achieving measurable actual component geometries taken from
Assel’s manufacturing capacity. benefits from the engineering capabilities BOM part numbers are compared to the
Under the leadership of Assel CEO delivered in an enterprise-level process CAD footprints to validate correct pin-to-
Jarosław Prolejko, Assel has moved to using engineering solution for electronics pad placement.
state of the art IT as a means to accomplish assembly. According to Assel’s production This type of pin-to-pad error is probably
three critical business goals: manager, it has become “the single most due to a component selection error in the
important engineering tool we use at Assel. customer BOM. Even though this part can
• Dramatically cut the time
Our present productivity gain is 20% still be soldered, the long-term reliability
required to process new
after 6 months, and our expectation is to of the soldered connection with zero heel
product introductions or NPIs
achieve 50% improvement in the next 6-10 fillet is very poor. This customer was very
• Build an organization of
months as we roll our assembly instruction pleased that Assel caught this error early
engineers around the concept
documents in to the new system.” in the NPI cycle. Even problems that are
that correctly applied IT creates
Before, the typical board with 500 often impossible to catch without software
new gains in engineering
components, single sided, would take an support, such as variations in the lead pitch
productivity that cannot
average of 7-8 hours engineering time. within the land pattern, can be quickly
otherwise be achieved
“Now we are completing the NPI in 5-6 hrs found.
• Create competitive advantages
and we are well on target to drop this to Assel saved incalculable time by
through unusually high
2 hours total time, from receipt of data to catching the above example BEFORE poor
knowledge and skill sets
programs running on the line.” yields and high rework would ultimately
developed through the
have resulted on the shop floor.
application of software which
Data neutralization
pushes the company to levels of
In the product engineering division, Data transfer and data
expertise which are not limited
all customer supplied data formats for centralization
by their small size, as is typically
CAD data, Gerber files, BOM files and There are 10 engineers at Assel between
the case for mid tier companies.
the Product Engineering and SMT
Divisions. Previously, a lot of time was lost
due to use of multiple tools, multiple data
formats and multiple locations for data
storage and retrieval. Now all project data
is stored within a single relational database
so all information transfers are streamlined
and seamless. All engineers have access to
complete project data at all times.
Virtual line simulation
As the factory grows and adds more
Figure 2. Pitch variations within pads of the same
customers, the need for optimizing the
Figure 1. Graphical view of pin-to-pad issues. component.
factory layout for SMT line configurations
38 – Global SMT & Packaging – October 2009 www.globalsmt.net
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56