The role of test equipment in the Industry 4.0
Testing equipment towards the factory of the future
Testing can play an important role in your Smart Factory. SPEA is providing you intelligent and connected test equipment, ready to be an interactive part of your production floor. Expert system, prescriptive maintenance, advanced smart automation, intelligent networking, are just some of the guidelines of our Industry 4.0 program.
Testing your products more intelligently will bring you to better product quality, less resources employed, more throughput, and reduced downtime.
The building blocks of Testing 4.0
Top-performance equipment
Our powerful, extremely precise and highly productive machines are the solid foundation for the Testing 4.0. Their top performance will be part of your flexible manufacturing network, offering open data interfaces while integrating connected sensors, intelligent modules, and scalable design.
Prescriptive maintenance
Our machines use IoT to predict and prevent equipment failures, improve reliability, and reduce downtime. High-performance, intelligent sensing modules provide an accurate, real-time equipment status monitoring, registering critical information such as temperature, pressure, humidity, vibration, energy consumption.
SPEA Equipment Performance Manager Archimede combines these data with key parameters into an expert system able to bring the concept of predictive maintenance a step ahead, to the prescriptive maintenance. This means the system is able to early identify trends that, if not considered, would affect performances or bring to failures, and to proactively propose and/or implement corrective actions. The expert system puts decades of know-how in electronics testing at your disposal, with the capability to enrich its knowledge with each tested product (board, IC, module, …). The results lie in enhanced equipment performance and resource efficiency, along with lower cost of maintenance and energy consumption.
Process integration
Our testing equipment will be an integrated, interactive part of your Industry 4.0 project.
Test equipment analytics is made available – in a targeted manner, highlighting only relevant information – to be combined with the data coming from different equipment across your factory. The use of open standards forms the basis for seamless exchange of information between test equipment and other machines, people, processes. The integration with factory MES, SECS/GEM, and TEMS allows for easy remote control and monitoring.
Test results are thoroughly analyzed to suggest possible improvements on the entire assembly process. Through wireless communication protocols (5G will be a key technology), test equipment can exchange information with the products to be tested, and with the factory mobile networks.
Smart automation
The volume production of complex, highly customized products – typical of Industry 4.0 – requires a high level of automation and machine autonomy to meet the capability to manage product differentiation along with high volumes.
SPEA test systems face this challenge with the ability to identify on-the-fly the product to be tested, automatically adjusting the machine setup according to the product requirements, then running the proper test instructions.
Our machines are ready to work in a completely automated way. They have eliminated the need for manual operations to load/unload the products under test, through their automatic in-line integration in compact-footprint solutions, or through smart automatic loading/unloading units.
In addition to minimizing the need for human intervention and routine operations, they will also enhance the level of human-machine interaction for those operations where human work is still needed, automatically providing guiding directions, relevant information, a comfortable user experience that goes far beyond a nice software graphics.
Optimize your test operations, along the process
SPEA equipment and solutions can bring you advantages along the whole lifecycle of your product. A comprehensive test strategy, from design to production test to repair operation, will allow you to eliminate redundancy, while saving on cost and benefiting of more quality, from start to finish.
Design
With our virtual tester, you can determine whether your product layout is perfectly testable, and with which test technology, while providing suggestions to improve your design for testability.
Prototyping & NPI
You can proficiently use SPEA testers to characterize your product, and test the pre-series until your design is consolidated. This allows you to provide feedback to the design, while guaranteeing the product quality since the beginning.
Production
SPEA testers will guarantee your product quality, by catching more failures than any other test equipment, being more productive, eliminating failures at final functional test and field returns.
Repair
SPEA testers can be proficiently used also by your repair center: they’ll be able to identify the failure cause, providing precise diagnostic indications that will guide your repair engineers.
The benefits of SPEA Industry 4.0 program
- Trend identification and early warning system
- Prescriptive maintenance
- Better application of expert know-how
- Real-time data analysis and implementation of service actions
- Open standards for easy integration of machines and systems
- Improved quality
- Product cost reduction
- Increased throughput capability
- Reduced maintenance costs
