What are some of the best Christmas gifts you’ve ever received? When you look back, is there one you knew right away that you’d remember for years afterward?
A Great Christmas Present
This is my first blog post for Creation, and it’s an exciting one for me.
I’ve been with Creation since 2003, and I think one thing that keeps our Customer Satisfaction so high is that we work with our customers to understand their needs as their business and industry requirements change. A key part of this is investing in our technological capabilities.
So this past Christmas, on December 31st, the team at Creation—Chicago received what we like to think is a very memorable present: a new, state of the art, SMT placement machine.
The unit replaces our existing chip shooter-based SMT placement machine line, which dated back to the late 1990’s and was well-used and well-loved.
Our new love, however, has several significant advantages for Creation—Chicago and our customers.
More Flexibility
With this new equipment, we’re able to use the same SMT feeders and programming tools across all three of our SMT lines, meaning faster changeover and better throughput.
Because of this common machine interface, we’re bringing the new machine online quickly so that we can take full advantage of our expanded capabilities.
Now, we can react more rapidly as our customers’ needs change because we can better level-load our production and schedule products at SMT swiftly and efficiently.
New Technology
We can offer our customers increased functionality because the new SMT machine also has many technological advances:
- Placement of smaller parts (down to 01005 chips!)
- Stacked BGA capability – package on package (PoP)
- Combined laser and look-up camera parts centering
- Mechanical gripper support for connectors and high-force insertion capability
- Enhanced offline and online NPI tools
- Increased SMT feeder and tray capacity
- Larger PCBs (up to 21.8” x 22”)
- 50,000 component/hour IPC placement rate for the three-machine array
Along with these advantages, the new line is less than half the footprint of our old machine. This opens up additional floor space within our facility that we can optimize for lean manufacturing.
The new machine is already operational and should be integrated with our other two lines within the next month.
As an engineer I’m excited that we’re able to support new technology.
As a businessman I’m excited that we’re ready for more growth.
And as a partner to our customers, I’m excited that we’re able to increase our reaction times and scheduling flexibility.
We’re looking forward to the rest of 2014!
