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 CAD data, Gerber files, BOM files and
headquartered near Gdansk, Poland. To to build a mid tier EMS company that can panelization/fabrication drawings are
achieve business development goals, Assel compete favorably with tier one companies neutralized into one manufacturing-
management concluded they must overcome on the basis of expertise, plus out perform focused data structure. The data structure
the natural barriers and limitations of a mid tier one giants in customer service and is BOM-centric, so the manufacturing data
tier size company. These typical limitations, reaction time to customer needs.” In synchronizes with ERP outputs. This creates
including slow and redundant work flows a shrinking global economy where the an early advantage of streamlining the data
for AOI and SMT programming and batch size of production runs are getting preparation process.
component library development, lead to smaller and smaller, the high efficiency and
sluggish customer response time and slow flexibility created by Prolejko’s vision is Data validation
NPI cycles. These technology limitations paying off in a number of ways. Product engineers rely on the system’s
build up barriers to successful competition part library to help identity BOM errors
with tier one suppliers for production reduced time to process Npi and footprint, or land pattern, errors very
volumes within Assel’s manufacturing The company is achieving measurable quickly prior to first run (Figure 1). The
capacity. benefits from the engineering capabilities actual component geometries taken from
Under the leadership of Assel CEO delivered in an enterprise-level process BOM part numbers are compared to the
Jarosław Prolejko, Assel has moved to using engineering solution for electronics CAD footprints to validate correct pin-to-
state of the art IT as a means to accomplish assembly. According to Assel’s production pad placement.
three critical business goals: manager, it has become “the single most This type of pin-to-pad error is probably
important engineering tool we use at Assel. due to a component selection error in the
• Dramatically cut the time
Our present productivity gain is 20% customer BOM. Even though this part can
required to process new product
after 6 months, and our expectation is to still be soldered, the long-term reliability
introductions or NPIs
achieve 50% improvement in the next 6-10 of the soldered connection with zero heel
• Build an organization of
months as we roll our assembly instruction fillet is very poor. This customer was very
engineers around the concept
documents in to the new system.” pleased that Assel caught this error early
that correctly applied IT creates
Before, the typical board with 500 in the NPI cycle. Even problems that are
new gains in engineering
components, single sided, would take an often impossible to catch without software
productivity that cannot
average of 7-8 hours engineering time. “Now support, such as variations in the lead pitch
otherwise be achieved
we are completing the NPI in 5-6 hrs and within the land pattern, can be quickly
• Create competitive advantages
we are well on target to drop this to 2 hours found.
through unusually high
total time, from receipt of data to programs Assel saved incalculable time by catching
knowledge and skill sets
running on the line.” the above example BEFORE poor yields and
developed through the
high rework would ultimately have resulted
application of software which
Data neutralization on the shop floor.
pushes the company to levels of
In the product engineering division,
expertise which are not limited
all customer supplied data formats for Data transfer and data centralization
by their small size, as is typically
There are 10 engineers at Assel between the
the case for mid tier companies.
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 – Global SMT & Packaging – September 2009 www.globalsmt.net
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