As global competition intensifies, boosting productivity has become a top priority for many manufacturing companies, prompting a variety of initiatives to improve operations. However, a survey by Fuji shows that more than 80% of customers who responded still experience productivity challenges.
Behind this is the structural problem of high dependence on people, fluid timing of work, and difficulty in managing progress. At the SMT site, operators are required to have advanced skills in a wide variety of tasks, such as operating multiple machines, changeovers, replenishing materials, and dealing with short stops.
As a response to this situation, many sites are increasingly using monitoring tools to visualize the situation. However, while the monitoring tool allows you to grasp the overall floor status and detailed machine status, they are limited in their ability to analyze short-term trends.

IPQC Expert is a factory improvement solution that covers such issues in the SMT process.


Features of IPQC Expert

1. Trends can be used to identify errors in the production line
2. Anyone can take appropriate action immediately
3. Easy to introduce

Ideally, the part pickup rate should be maintained at 99.95% or higher during the part placement process.

However, in actual production, even if the pickup rate drops below 99.94% (three errors occur during 5,000 pickup operations), it is likely that most companies continue production and see what happens. What is important is to pay attention to when and how often pickup errors occurred. By focusing on this, we may notice serious causes that cannot be detected by monitoring tools.

For example, if these three errors occurred during the last 30 pickup operations, the pickup rate during this period would be 90.0%, indicating a very serious condition. However, because monitoring tools use the cumulative pickup count as a denominator, it is difficult to grasp such short-term worsening trends, which may lead to missing serious conditions.

Even in such a case, IPQC Expert can check the pickup rate in short-term periods, such as 30 pickup operations, to detect a rapidly deteriorating pickup rate trend and alert operators for further action at an early stage.

Users who have introduced this have reported that they have been able to reduce the number of rejected parts and the number of times they need to replenish parts.

When multiple errors, long waits for the previous or next stage, or other problems occur during production, operators must take action to return production to normal. While experienced operators can take appropriate action immediately, new operators may not know what to do and may take a long time before taking action, causing the line to stop. IPQC Expert eliminates these differences from person to person, helping any operators to handle problems appropriately.

IPQC Expert can also be used to register appropriate actions taken by experienced operators as knowledge. If a problem occurs on production lines, IPQC Expert provides guidance on the appropriate action along with a warning. IPQC Expert can also designate terminals to display warnings and operational guidance, directing them to operators who can reliably handle the condition and prevent it from worsening.

If collecting and registering knowledge takes time, users can use the standard recommended countermeasures registered by our company.

IPQC Expert is an information-based solution for pick and place machines (chip mounters). Therefore, data linkage with other machines including inspection machines is not required, enabling easy introduction.

Even for users who find it difficult to obtaining the knowledge of experienced operators in a short period of time, the default registered data is available for use immediately after setup. You can use the default data to start improvement activities for the time being and gradually customize the work guidance so that it is optimal to your company's needs.

We introduced only a portion of the events for which IPQC Expert is useful.

Other examples include:
・Waiting periods for the previous/next stage
・Error occurrences at certain units
・Cycle time imbalance
・Vision processing error occurrences


IPQC Expert captures serious conditions that are difficult to be detected by monitoring tools and supports to maintain and improve productivity by preventing error stops and delays in response. It is easy to install and ready to use immediately after installation.

For more details, please feel free to contact us using the contact form. Casual inquiries welcome.



Applicable machines: NXTR S model, AIMEXR, NXT III, NXT IIIc, AIMEX III, AIMEX IIIc