Systems Integration

I was sitting here thinking...because that's pretty easy to do; just sit here and think...

Anyway, a long time ago (back in the 90's) I learned that one good way to improve a process is to look for similar processes that are successful, and emulate them. It stands to reason then that emulating successes from other industries should help us to be successful in the PCB industry.

While still employed at Orbotech, I often carried this banner internally. As part of the software group there, I would often approach problems by looking to similar companies in other industries. My old standby was Parametric Technologies, the maker of ProEngineer software (I think they are called something else now). I had some experience running ProE at my previous job at the service bureau, and saw many similarities between the markets served by that CAM system and the markets served by Orbotech's CAM systems. Most of the other engineers probably got tired of me drawing parallels, in fact.

But once again, I'm looking at various shop-floor integration projects, CAM-->machine interactions, and other data integrations and I'm thinking "do other industries have these same problems?". If I were in a plastic injection molding shop, do I have 4 different injectors with 25 different material types and 3 different excision machines and a measurement machine, and do each of them take a completely different file? Do I have to tweak the outputs from my ProE or SolidWorks CAM system to get the equipment on the shop floor to work?

I believe I'll investigate that industry a bit more and see if there are similarities. Maybe they've conquered the integration beast to some degree and we can learn something from them. Or, perhaps they haven't, and I should learn more about ProE :-)