PROFILE: ONROM
How to improve your factory Much like a lot of the world, data is the key to success.
Coming into land at Amsterdam Airport you get a great view of the city that holds so much culture, depravity and weed. Sat among stags excited for the weekend, was me, looking out the window, and trying to remember the last time I visited such a beautiful city. Obviously, I was making the trip for a different reason. I was on my way to pay Omron a visit. While enterprises have been getting to grips with AI, factories around the world have started to lag behind, as machinery designed with one purpose, making stuff, is being asked to produce data as well as products. Omron Industrial Automation appears to believe they have revolutionised the modern factory, enabling owners to maintain a tighter grip on quality. As a result, the business has gone on tour, with a Flexible Manufacturing Roadshow, a trip through Europe highlighting the innovation happening on the factory floor, as the name suggests. During the roadshow, News in the Channel sat down with Tim Foreman, OMRON Europe's R&D manager and AI expert, who says that these ageing factories hold technologies that did not have data processing and artificial intelligence in mind. “Many of the existing factories were not designed with data and artificial intelligence in mind, they were designed to manufacture
things as quickly as possible,” says Tim. "Gathering digital information for additional insight was never considered. “That means that many machines either don't have the information or they don’t have complete information. Especially with factories or machines that were never designed with this purpose in mind, they can act as a bottleneck for projects which are stopped because they cannot get through this cleaning data phase and it is too much effort to clean the data or it's unclear where the data is coming from.” Copy and pasting Tim illustrated the point by describing a scenario where circuit boards were failing quality checks within their own factory. “We manufacture electronics, which typically starts with an empty green card with gold packs on it where the components will be soldered on,” he says. “The first step is to put solder paste to solder components on top of it. “In many factories, including our own, there is a visual machine that checks if the paste has been applied properly before it goes to the next phase where components are put on the base. If there are one or two pads that are not okay, it will still continue. But if there are three boards in a row that have a red mark, the machine stops and engineers are called
Tim Foreman R&D manager, Europe
industrial.omron.co.uk
Many of the existing factories were “
not designed with data and artificial intelligence in mind, they were designed to manufacture things as quickly as possible.
”
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