By Pasi Röppänen
Consumers expect more powerful, yet eye-catching smart devices with better quality at more affordable prices. The highly competitive and fast-paced market of the consumer electronics industry pushes manufacturing plants to maximize the output in quantity and quality while minimizing the costs of operations in all of its aspects.
Automated test and assembly solutions enable global consumer brands to aim for 100% quality, to design finer products, lower operational costs in a sustainable manner and to shorten the time-to-market. Billions of performance and design-driven devices just cannot be shipped without flexible automation.
The consumer electronics and electronics industries have been labor-intensive, but the automation boom is speeding up. IHS predicts that the industrial robot markets in these industries will grow the fastest because of the increasing necessity to automate processes. A heavy investment round is shaking the industry globally, particularly China.
Isn’t the high level of automation enough to secure production excellence? The question remains, why also pay for maintenance? The answer is straightforward. Sacrificing maintenance expenditures for an immediate improvement in profitability, leading to poorer performance, quality and productivity, adversely affects long-term profitability.
Preventive care of production equipment and timely planned maintenance are key elements of the operational excellence in mass manufacturing of ever smaller and smarter devices. The importance of life-cycle and warranty support is well recognized by the industry giants manufacturing smart devices.
The trend has been for some time to move from a reactive approach to a proactive one in the provision of services for production automation, both lines and stand-alone equipment. Automation integrators and robotics providers aim to sell value-added business services, instead of selling only manufactured products.
The move from an asset-centric management to a service-centric relationship model drive manufacturers towards choosing an automation partner that has all the expertise and capability to help manage their changing needs over the entire equipment lifetime. More importantly, they seek from automation integrators the willingness to actively look for new solutions to perform service tasks more cost effectively on a global scale.
Why Reinvent the Wheel?

Figure 1. Pasi Röppänen from JOT Automation said that the best way to scale the production is to know on the machine level whether the factory floor is running effectively. JOT has built a dedicated lifecycle support program for the company’s G test product family.
Why reinvent the wheel if you can rely on the expertise of standardization organizations? Industry standards, like PSK 6201 and SFS_EN 13306, specifying technical and managerial areas of maintenance, are a good starting point for improving the cost effectiveness of life-cycle support of production automation tailored for specific customer needs.
As an example, JOT Automation has built a dedicated lifecycle support program, based on these standards, for the company’s G test product family, including the JOT G3 Final Tester, enabling all-encompassing and more effective customer support. The results are promising (Figure 1).
In the case example, a regular health check was defined as a starting point for the preventive care of the company’s test automation solutions. In many cases, timely planned check-ups were enough to ensure non-stop functionality and avoid costly breakdowns and downtime. A careful inspection of the equipment’s environment in the production line and all technical interfaces, like cables, sensors, connectors, control units and fan, was carried out by experts.

Figure 2. Regular health check as a starting point is important for preventive care. Routine and overhaul maintenance tasks can be optimized by this three-step approach.
This way, routine and more comprehensive overhaul maintenance tasks can be optimized generating remarkable cost savings and production reliability. The three-step approach in preventive maintenance (Figure 2) also has improved service agreements and feedback reporting with customers.
Smarter Services for Smart Factories
Industry 4.0 and Big Data are key topics in current discussions and maybe the most important trends in the industry shaping the future of process-based manufacturing by taking it beyond computer-integrated manufacturing. Big Data enables the unifying of daily production to financial metrics and contextual recommendations resulting in greater value for manufacturers. The use of advanced analytics tools for the profitable scaling of operations, improving yield rates and reducing costs will increase tremendously.
The best way to scale the production is to know on the machine level whether the factory floor is running effectively. More in-depth operational insights can be delivered based on always-connected production equipment and sensors providing machine activity data and sending alerts for preventive maintenance.
Furthermore, maintenance tasks can be carried out by remotely or virtually guided self-service. Remote services become a strategic asset and a key customer satisfaction factor for global manufacturing networks.
Development of remote services is identified as a core area for JOT Automation’s product and service development. Remote services and machine on-line monitoring are not new features in the company’s portfolio, it has provided such solutions for years.
Now, the company is taking the next steps on the roadmap of remote services. The aim is to enhance customers’ ability to analyze data by developing plug-and-play type standard interfaces for ERP systems and reporting. That’s the most powerful way to provide the greatest return on investments (ROI) for future smart factories.
For more information, contact By Pasi Röppänen, Director of Customer Service Solutions, JOT Automation Ltd., Elektroniikkatie 17, 90590 Oulu, Finland; ; Web site: www.jotautomation.com
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