The National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (NEMI) plug and play factory project

The National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative's (NEMI) plug and play Factory Project addressed the issues of how to quickly integrate new pieces of electronics assembly equipment into a shop floor line management system and how to manage the vast amounts of data available in today's electronics manufacturing environment. The necessary technical infrastructure was designed, developed, and demonstrated over a two-year period. New standards activities for electronics manufacturing were initiated where existing standards were either non-existent or insufficient to achieve the project goals. 1. Background The National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative is a US-based consortium of 55 electronics companies. The goal of the consortium is to increase the competitiveness of US electronics manufacturers. NEMI develops five-year technology roadmaps and performs gap analysis to identify critical needs of their original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and electronics manufacturing service (EMS) members. New projects are initiated based on the results of the gap analysis. The plug and play Factory project was started under the auspices of the Factory Information Systems Technical Implementation Group in December 1997. The goal of the project was to design, develop and demonstrate a technical infrastructure to enable the replacement of both electronics assembly equipment and electronics assembly software in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost normally associated with those activities. The goals of the project were to reduce the amount of time and cost that is takes to integrate a new piece of electronics assembly equipment into a shop floor environment and start collecting data and controlling that equipment. It is estimated today that the integration cost of a typical factory information system is up to four times the cost of purchasing that system in the first place. Also, the possible two years that it typically takes to design and implement a new factory floor system is much longer than the product technology life cycles of today's electronic products. Often what happens after a long period of analysis, design and implementation is that users declare " It is just what I asked for, but not what I want ". The reason for this is that the business model has changed so drastically during the time it took to implement the factory information system that the system is at best underutilized and at worst never used to support real production.