FEATURE CONTRACT MANUFACTURING We've been working very hard for the
AN AUTOMATED RESPONSE
In a Q& A session Mattias Andersson, founder & CEO, MTEK gives his view on business opportunities amidst the pandemic and how automation is driving manufacturing to the next level
M
TEK Industry, located in Sweden, develops and deploys software,
solutions and services for real-time intelligent and collaborative production, with a special focus on adaptive automation, digitalisation and virtualisation of small parts assembly processes. The company creates software defined robotics solutions that help customers increase the efficiency and quality of their businesses. In a Q & A Mattias Anderson has this to say:
Q: What impact has the last three months had on you & your customers? It is sad to say that we will benefit from the current situation in terms of customers trying to digitise and automate much more. Of course, this is something that we didn't see coming, but this has made it clear that companies need to be able to oversee their supply chains better and the frailties on those supply chains has become more and more apparent. We have a situation where clients are considering how to move production back or to move to a new market. This has been one of the biggest disruptors in the industry for the last 20 years. It’s bigger than the lead-free introduction. It’s equivalent to the introduction of SMT lines way back in the 1980s.
Q: Tell us more about your digital building blocks that allow robotics solutions to be plugged in where
10 OCTOBER 2020 | ELECTRONICS
they're needed? We've just launched MCell, our modular approach to adaptive automation. In one customer case we were able to reduce headcount on the line by around 20, while also adding more value to the product, more traceability, having more information, and creating the foundation for predictive analytics. We see an enormous interest right now in the MCell approach. Beneath that is what we call MBrain, which is our factory operating system that actually provides intelligence to the MCell solution.
Q: So your underlying factory intelligence software that you use with these digital building blocks, the first one you're releasing is MCell Insertion. Was that something that you saw as a specific challenge? Insertion is the reason the industry has been moving to low cost countries for the last 25 years, and many are no longer low-cost. The challenge that we actually solved is the problem of programming a robot. It has been extremely cumbersome. It could take weeks or months to make just a motion pattern for a robot. What we're able to do now is what we call zero touch programming. In less than a minute we're able to produce the program for the MCell robots for an assembly station. And we add the value of having the robot adapt to its surroundings, which makes us a little bit different.
last three years to develop this. We've had some beta customers where we've been trying out ideas and they’ve provided a lot of great input. We have had issues with the equipment itself because we're pushing it to the limits, to where it's not supposed to be working. All those things have now been solved. The SMT industry has reached the
level of commoditisation such that the machine costs are basically the same all over the world. But now we're targeting labor cost, making sure that people are not having a lot of ergonomic issues, carpal tunnel syndrome, etc... At the same time, we are emphasising the impact of having a short development time and deployment time of the automation solution. If we have all the information available, we could, in theory, deploy a full MCell within about 40 hours. We need to have everything, so that the deployment time becomes really, really short. Going back three years, one of the
first things we tried to accomplish was how to create a solution that has a hundred seconds changeover or less. We're not there yet, but we’re below 10 minutes for a change over. We have completed a remote deployment in Eastern European for a large EMS client. The COVID-19 situation has actually pushed us to adapt. It is good that we are now able to do this. It gives us a possibility to scale faster.
Q: When you say zero touch and super-fast software programming, that's using CAD data from the board to create the insertion program? That's a big part of it. We have all the CAD information, along with information on the board, components and the rest. One of the secret sauces is our closed-loop machine learning, which allows the MCell to actually learn its surroundings, learn the behaviour of the product and remember it. The environment doesn’t need to be
perfect, we don't need things bolted to the floor, we don't need to have very heavy equipment. You can roll our solution in and you can roll it out and it will actually identify its surroundings itself. Not only that, but it also adapts throughout the manufacturing process. It also records and highlights any
Mattias Andersson, founder & CEO, MTEK
variation that shouldn't be there and feeds that back. That's a secondary benefit, but actually one of the most appreciated things about MCell.
MTEK
www.mtek.co.uk
/ ELECTRONICS
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