1. The preface

Printed Circuit Board (PCB) refers to a conductive pattern (called Printed Circuit) made of Printed Circuit, Printed element or a combination of both on a predetermined design on an insulating substrate.

For printed board enterprises, generally has a variety of orders, order quantity is limited, strict quality requirements, short delivery cycle and other characteristics. Enterprises should not only pay attention to and develop processing technology, but also closely cooperate with customer designers to realize the integration of design/engineering. In addition, in order to effectively control the processing process, production instructions (MI) are usually used to control the processing process of products and implement the mass production of products according to “LotCard”.

To sum up, some ERP modules in PCB industry have distinct industry characteristics, and these modules are often the difficulties in the implementation of ERP system in PCB industry. Due to its own particularity and the lack of understanding of PCB industry by domestic ERP suppliers, both DOMESTIC PCB manufacturers and ERP suppliers are in the exploratory stage at present. Based on years of experience in the management consulting industry and the informatization implementation of PCB industry, I believe that the difficulties that hinder the smooth implementation of ERP system in PCB industry mainly include: engineering management and ECN change, production schedule, batch card control, inner layer bonding and conversion of multiple units of measurement, quick quotation and cost accounting. The following five questions will be discussed separately.

2. Project management and ECN change

PCB industry has a wide variety of products, each customer will have different product requirements, such as size, layer, material, thickness, quality certification, etc. The processing materials, process flow, process parameters, detection method, quality requirements, etc., will be issued to the production department and outsourcing units through the preparation of MI (production instructions). In addition, some items of product design will be described by graphical method, such as cutting size diagram, circuit diagram, lamination diagram, V-cut diagram and so on, which inevitably requires ERP product graphics record and processing function is very powerful, and even should have automatic drawing graphics (such as cutting size diagram, lamination diagram) function.

Based on the above characteristics, new requirements are put forward for ERP products in this industry: for example, MI compilation module is required. In addition, it often takes a long time to complete the MI production of a complex multi-layer board, and the delivery time required by customers is relatively urgent in most cases. How to provide the tools to make MI quickly is an important topic. If the intelligent engineering module can be provided, according to the process production level of PCB manufacturers, the common standard process route can be formulated, and automatically selected and combined according to the requirements of the production process, and then reviewed by the MI personnel of the engineering department, greatly shorten the MI production time, and will greatly improve the competitiveness of PCB ERP suppliers.

ECN engineering changes often occur in the production process of PCB industry products, and there are often internal ECN and external ECN changes (customer engineering document changes). This ERP system must have a special engineering change management function, and this management through the whole planning, production, shipment control. Its significance is to assist the engineering department and related departments to monitor the design change process of the work, to provide the relevant information needed to minimize the loss caused by the change.

3. Scheduling of production plan

The core of ERP system is to provide accurate production schedule and material requirement plan through MPS(master production plan) and MRP(Material requirement Plan) operation. But for PCB industry, the traditional ERP production planning function is inadequate.

This industry often appears “more do not, less do not accept, next time do not use” orders, so it is very important for the correct assessment of production quantity. Generally speaking, the evaluation of the quantity of opening materials should be calculated by integrating the number of orders, the stock of finished products, the number of WIP and the scrap ratio. However, the results of the calculation should be converted into the number of production plates, and A and B plates should be combined at the same time. Even some manufacturers will open the number of aniseed sheet number, which is different from the assembly industry.

In addition, how much material to open, when to open material also depends on the production lead time. However, it is also difficult to calculate PCB production lead time: the production efficiency varies greatly with different machines and equipment, different skilled workers and different order quantities. Even if a relatively standard data can be calculated, but often can not withstand the impact of “extra rush board”. Therefore, the application of MPS in PCB industry usually does not provide the most reasonable production schedule, but only tells the planner which products will be affected by the existing schedule.

MPS should also provide a detailed daily production schedule. The premise of daily production planning is the determination and expression of the production capacity of each process. The calculation model of the production capacity of different processes is also quite different: for example, the production capacity of drilling room depends on the number of drilling RIGS, the number of drill heads and the speed; The lamination line depends on the pressing time of hot press and cold press and the material pressed; Sunk copper wire depends on wire length and product layer number; The production capacity of brewery depends on the number of machines, AB mold, and staff proficiency. How to provide a comprehensive and reasonable operation model for such different processes is a difficult problem for PCB production management personnel as well as ERP suppliers.