Mentor Graphics enhances manufacturing execution software with business intelligence

SMTA International, FT. WORTH, USA: Mentor Graphics Corp. announced the Valor MSS Business Intelligence (BI) product suite. This new product allows management of PCB assembly lines to obtain reports and analysis of the quality, asset utilization and materials management of their production execution. With this analysis, management can make intelligence-based decisions, improve their production line execution, and reduce excess inventories, for lower costs and improved profits.

“The execution of a complex production line produces extensive data but this is just data, not intelligence,” stated Dan Hoz, GM of Mentor Graphics Valor Division. “By providing analysis of this data, we can give management the information they need to make better decisions. With small margins in the manufacturing sector, these decisions can mean the difference between a manufacturing facility that is running at a profit or not.”

The Mentor Valor MSS product suite covers the manufacturing execution process from line planning, through execution, traceability, materials management, and test/quality assurance. Throughout these processes, data is generated and made available to the business intelligence application for analysis and display functionality on management’s desktop.

The dashboard display technology is easy to configure and use, and gives management a user-friendly opportunity to “slice and dice” the raw data to achieve their desired insight, generate reports, and make intelligence-based decisions. The business intelligence functionality comes with more than 30 standard reports as well as the ability to customize to the specific configurations and needs of the manufacturing organization.

"Since we take on the toughest projects in the PCB production industry, the MSS Business Intelligence solution from Mentor Graphics is helping our factory achieve even higher performance,” stated Farid Anani, manufacturing manager at Computrol. “We need immediate access to clear information we can act on and BI provides this visibility. BI is reducing our time-to-corrective action, improving our bottom line profits, and enabling us to offer better service to our customers.”

A simple example of how a manufacturer like Computrol uses the BI functionality is to compare the quality of different machines on the line and either correct or replace a less than par machine. It is very easy to set up comparisons on several different quality metrics using data such as PCB traceability and failures. This can lead to process changes or the selection of new capital equipment.

Using the Valor MSS Business Intelligence product, Computrol was able to easily justify a change in screen printers because of the clear improvement seen in the quality of products run on screen printer A vs. screen printer B.