The SolderSmart
For over 40 years Zot Engineering has been a specialist in manufacturing all aspects of PCBA and Assembly. We are currently active in many sectors such as Aerospace, Energy industry, Health technology, medical devices and Electronics and Infrastructure. We continuously seek out the latest advance technologies to ensure we manufacture products to the highest standard.
THE CHALLENGE
For one of our long-standing customers, we manufacture over 110,400 parts on a yearly basis which consist of approximately 398,300 soldering joints. To allow the business to grow we would need to increase our headcount within our production team therefore increasing our capacity. Our biggest challenge is finding individuals with the high skill level that would ensure we maintain our high-quality standards, unfortunately, there is a massive gap in the market for highly skilled hand solderers making it extremely hard to fill these positions.
SOLUTION
Our solution to address the skill shortage and increase our capacity was to invest in technology aids for soldering and robotic soldering which is called “SolderSmart” this also saved on operator time and increased our production reliability. We installed SolderSmart in April 2022 with the advanced training completed over 2 days. In early May 2022, our production team were trained which allowed us to complete installation qualification, Operational qualification, and Performance qualification. All processes were under engineering control until the trials and verification was completed at the end of May 2022.
THE RESULT
The Soldersmart has a high initial cost, whereas the manual soldering costs were lower by approximately 70%. However, the soldersmart machine took less time in the same soldering process as the manual soldering. In addition to this we can also have a cell of Soldersmart machines operated by only one operator which will allow us to maximize our utilisation of our automated soldering capabilities.
In summary, the return on investment will quickly be recognised over a 3-year period with the added value of reduced labour costs, increased output and improved efficiencies.
- Consistently high quality soldering
- 4+1 axis soldering robot, freedom of movement and high axis accuracy
- Point by point with Pre-soldering and Drag soldering options
- Zero point calibration and soldering tip measurement
