Industry 4.0: Reduce costs through component counting and interconnected technology

VisiConsult X-ray Systems & Solutions GmbH, the leading specialist for industrial X-ray equipment and automation, developed a new and innovative solution for the automatic counting of SMD-components on reels with intelligent type estimation.

Especially electronic manufacturers in Europe face an enormous cost pressure from competitors based in low-wage countries. Time is literally money. Therefore, it is more important than ever to automate processes continuously to increase efficiency and to keep the margin. To avoid production stops caused by inventory discrepancies, it is crucial to count the components on reels. To make the tedious counting process feasible, VisiConsult replaced the time-consuming manual or optical approach by an innovative solution based on X-ray technology. This reduces the time required per reel from several minutes to less than 10 seconds. The XRHCount is a compact X-ray system to count all common SMD component types on tapes with a diameter of up to 400 mm.

An absolute innovation is the new Counting Cloud. New component types do not have to be trained locally. Instead the uncountable reels can be directly submitted to the VisiConsult development team. Regularly every plant will receive an automatic update. The already very extensive database is continuously growing through the input of dozens of systems worldwide. This includes big sites such as Flextronics, with a reel volume of several thousand reels per day. Currently the counting accuracy is already above 99.9%, while no component database is required.

Another new feature is the seamless integration with common and specific IT infrastructure. This results in a further increase in speed and better process stability. The counting result can automatically be sent to MES or ERP systems, if desired. Renowned systems, such as FUJI Trax, Cogiscan, SAP etc. incl. traceability support are already pre-implemented. For custom systems the XRHCount offers extensive open database interfaces. The target is that the XRHCount can be integrated into every system on the market.