Whether you build printed circuit boards for your own products in a vertical production process or work as an electronics manufacturing service (EMS) for other companies, fast turnaround, high product quality and minimum scrap contribute significantly to your company’s bottom line. You choose equipment for each process step to get the best and most economical performance, which often means buying machines from several vendors, each of them handling data inputs and outputs on a different platform in its own format. Thoroughly analyzing that data requires consolidating it into a complete picture that allows process adjustments at any step in real time, regardless of the native data format at that step. Communication remains possible, but you need conversion software that understands data from both sides of every interface.
In February, Mentor Graphics established the Open Manufacturing Language (OML) initiative to achieve exactly that result. The goal? To create a single, normalized, vendor-neutral communications standard for PCB production—including assembly, inspection, test and rework—that supports the Internet of Manufacturing. To facilitate these efforts, Mentor created the OML Consortium to allow manufacturers to obtain and share language enhancements and other information. The consortium allows equipment vendors to create interfaces between their own standards or proprietary formats to OML, thereby lowering learning curves for customers of new or updated equipment and reducing ramp-up time and costs.
Adopting a common format for data generated throughout a facility and from facilities around the world will help to establish consistent product standards, minimizing the likelihood that a pernicious process problem in one factory will spread to others. Over time, you will undoubtedly maintain and improve your operations by replacing equipment with newer models or offerings from different vendors. Without language commonality, every equipment upgrade or replacement would require dramatically revising the analysis software, a formidable task.
The OML connects the dots in PCB assembly. Data generated applies to the entire production process, enabling manufacturing-level control and management-level analysis. Exchange of OML messages comes through the mature, open, Transmission-Control Protocol, which already enjoys wide support. Software-development kits available from the consortium reduce the effort to create OML environments. An SDK handles OML communication, allowing developers to concentrate on the unique aspects of their situations. One such kit allows using Visual Studio IDE to communicate with existing OML applications with just a reference to an OML assembly and a few additional lines of code.
Data collection with OML to create a KPI dashboard (Source: Mentor Graphics)
OML offers many other tools as well. It allows constructing dashboards that summarize available data based on parameters that you determine and update in real time, flagging anomalies that you requested, including relatively hard-to-track key performance indicators such as peak and mean production rates, real-time first-pass yields, process bottlenecks, and pre-determined conditions that require stopping the line, such as insufficient raw materials at a particular production step. The visual dashboard form allows seeing alarms more quickly than other formats can.
Like all consortia, the benefits of OML will grow with contributions from increasing numbers of participants. To that end, the website makes the language specification, software, documentation and sample code available to any registered member, and membership is free.
Source: "Open Manufacturing Language (OML): An Internet of Manufacturing Solution for PCB Assembly."
