Inventive Financing With True Capacity On Demand

With TCoD, customers can just buy the equipment from Assembléon that they need for day-to-day production, and hire extra (compact, modular, calibration-free) robot heads to meet peaks in demand. The initiative can save customers over 20% on equipment costs by breaking the traditional purchasing of equipment based on possible future peak capacity. TCoD also makes for safer investment by removing the danger of overcapacity.

The initiative has led to early results, and one new Chinese customer has found an attractive twist. “We recently sold three A-Series lines to Shanghai based Tian Wei,” remarks Burkhardt Frick, Assembléon’s Asia Pacific General Manager. “The customer bought machines with eight robots, and rented an extra six robots for the first six months. That reduced initial investments, and also reduced the start-up risks of introducing the customer’s new product. The cash generated from selling the extra products can go to buy the rented robots.”

“The alternative to renting equipment during production peaks is to outsource, but that is not an attractive option,” says Leo vandeVall, President of Assembléon America, Inc.. “It takes time to set up and qualify, time that is sometimes just not available because of market demands for fast delivery. Retaining production in house makes better use of the customer’s existing organization, machine capacity and test equipment. It also saves on organization, assembly, test and delivery costs of the outsourcing company. That was a major factor for one of our customers – Advance Assembly Inc (AAI) in the US – which has taken a three-month rental for extra production capacity.”

Assembléon’s True Capacity on Demand therefore helps bring adaptive manufacturing to dynamic production environments. The machine configuration itself remains unchanged, the footprint does not increase, and the production line itself is left undisturbed. TCoD also saves on maintenance and services like air supply to support associated overcapacity equipment.

TCoD hence minimizes the cost per placement of electronics assembly, despite fluctuations in production periods. It smoothes out seasonal patterns by allowing customers to hire extra capacity while maintaining the same equipment footprint. It also prepares equipment makers for the global economic upturn

Assembléon’s modular, calibration-free robots give the market’s fastest adaptation to machines on the line. Expansion can be made in easy output increments of only 6,000 components an hour – impossible with (for example) gantry based systems, which are much more complex and much less versatile.

Assembléon’s A-Series already sets the industry benchmark for lowest (single-digit) defects per million placements. True parallel placement optimizes every placed component for the industry’s highest First Pass Yield. The A-Series boasts the lowest energy and air consumption in the industry, leading to lower bills, reduced CO2 emissions, and so smaller carbon footprint.