Developing skills to exploit technology

Citation

Onori, M. (2006), "Developing skills to exploit technology", Assembly Automation, Vol. 26 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/aa.2006.03326daa.002

Developing skills to exploit technology

Keywords: Nanotechnology, Assembly, Skills

The European electronic industry, as most other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development areas, is confronted with major potential challenges in the decades to come. These are varied and range from the ageing population to new ethical requirements, the widening globalisation of markets, information technology progress, as well as the forming of regulations curbing energy usage and pollution control. In Europe, these challenges have been predominantly met by outsourcing production, with assembly being the major sector affected. A recent, quite optimistic, estimate put the loss of assembly jobs within the EU in the past five years at 20 per cent of the total workforce. Although often portrayed as threats, the symptoms being denoted in the European electronics industry are, in fact, part of a shift in knowledge and technology infrastructures created by these trends. It is not only stricter regulations and the need to streamline companies that forces one to outsource. There are purely technical issues as well.

The past few years have been characterised by an almost overwhelming interest for nano and micro-technology. New processes have been developed, research funding has been extremely focussed on the topic, and many micro and nano parts are now produceable. However, many micro products still remain dormant due to the fact that they cannot be assembled efficiently. What remains to be solved, in other words, is the integration of these new micro and nano parts into products. Basically, the transition from macro to nano products will not occur overnight if the assembly issues are not solved. Moreover, micro and nano products will not always exist as purely independent entities but, also, as parts of larger products that still require some macro assembly. Therefore, the societies that intend to support the development of world-class micro and nano technologies will have to rely, in order to succeed, upon the coordinated fusion of new technologies and production strategies to existing production constraints and educational infrastructures: evolution rather than revolution.

No one will debate whether the manufacture and application of MST/MEMS is expected to become a critical strategic industrial sector in the coming years. These technologies are finding increased applications for different product sectors, including automotive products (sensors, actuators, etc.) and portable products (switching, filtering, signal generation for wireless applications, etc.). The underlying issue is that production follows markets, and develops markets. This means that it is extremely important to maintain electronic production in-house. The reason lies in that there is a clear trend from built-to-order to assembly-to- order to drive product differentiation and customer satisfaction. Hence, the potential economic impact of new micro-assembly technologies is far greater: assembly, unlike parts manufacturing, is far more sensitive to the disclosure of product characteristics. This implies that if outsourcing of assembly is to continue, process and product knowledge is being lost. In the long-term this will result in the loss of entire market segments, since the nations acquiring the outsourced assembly are highly educated and responsive: the annual growth in electronics production in China was estimated to be approximately 15 per cent for the period 2001-2006 and in Europe of not more than 4 per cent.

The interesting issue here is that whilst an entirely new academic and industrial elite is being formed within micro & nano technologies, the basic business and technological foundations will remain relatively similar to those already in practice. However, if micro and nano technologies will be left to develop their own production and business infrastructures, without exploiting the already existing industrial and academic foundations, their progress will be seriously delayed. Assembly should therefore be chosen as the process to focus on due to its strategic importance, because most current products are a mixture of micro, nano and macro parts, and because it is the process that will be most negatively affected by the further miniaturisation of parts and products. Its strategic importance is dictated by the following aspects:

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  Assembly represents the customer order entry point. Production strategies, whether Just-In-Time, ConWip, or other, are heavily dependent on the efficiency of the assembly process.

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  Assembly dictates to a very high degree the design requirements of the products. Design for Assembly, Design for Disassembly, Design for Reliability are all assembly-dependent methods.

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  Assembly is the process in which the product should obtain its final identity. That is to say that product variants should be created within final assembly, an aspect which affects the assembly system design and product design.

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  Assembly remains the only production process without a structured set of operational process models for different modelling applications (STEP, Virtual Enterprising, etc.).

In the next few months, several Roadmaps will be published, including ManuFuture, Leadership, mSapient and EUPASS. It will be interesting to see whether the notion of assemblability, or produceability, will be brought forward or whether the re-iteration of an expected explosion in electronic parts is to be expected. Ageing populations in the west and booming societies in the east can easily spell a need for entirely new products and services, but will we be really able to deliver all that we may create? After having visited many companies, and seen many radically new products that could not be mass-produced, the question remains hard to answer. All that is painfully clear is that the companies that are likely to succeed in the coming years, and conquer new markets, are those that place greater strategic value in production technology than curbing short-term costs.

M. OnoriBased at The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden