The trend toward smart manufacturing and industry 4.0 continues to accelerate.  The pandemic induced supply chain challenges, and tight labor markets are encouraging investments in the factories of the future.  Key among the necessary improvements to achieve advanced manufacturing are tools that support intelligent inventory and materials management.

• Labor challenges
• Accurate Inventory on demand
• Measure to manage

Equipment as talent

Among the most important influences of the lingering pandemic have been on labor and employment.  Not only is labor in short supply, and associated costs increasing, but the available talent is less inclined toward manufacturing jobs.  To exacerbate this shortage, much of the most experienced electronics manufacturing talent is aging out of the workforce.  Fortunately, these challenges are coinciding with an exciting convergence of automation and artificial intelligence in combination with established production tools and software.  In the arena of inspection tools, the merger of these technologies is resulting in tools that can outperform human inspectors in accuracy, efficiency and cost.

Actionable Data

For advanced manufacturing to truly advance, its essential that inventories be continuously, instantaneously, and accurately updated.  Electronics manufacturers depend on having the right parts available, and inventories updated as builds are completed.  With intelligent X-ray parts counters, component storages systems can integrate directly with automated units that accurately count, validate, and update management systems without any human interaction.  The intersection of X-ray inspection, automation, and artificial intelligence enable these systems to perform critical material management day or night, with greater efficiency and accuracy than even the most contentious operators.

Materials management

Manufacturing at its essences is converting materials into products.  The factories of the (near) future will depend on managing and measuring inventories with advanced tools that provide essential data directly to management systems.  Automated X-ray parts counters, such as those being developed at Creative Electron (see our latest patent award), will resolve the limits of human inspection while supporting advanced electronics manufacturing with accurate and up-to-date inventory data.  Such systems will manage components inventories with the efficiency demanded by the EMS factories of the future.

Is your factory adopting the standards of industry 4.0 and beyond?  Reach out to the team at Creative Electron to learn how we help leading electronics manufactures modernize their inventory management.