Shoich Rashed, Sales Director, Mek (Marantz Electronics)

The complexity of electronics manufacturing will continue to grow throughout 2024, due to growing market demands for higher reliability, faster turnarounds times on design changes, and continued supply chain and labor market pressures.

The market is awash with IoT based solutions that claim to help solve these challenges, however they are unable to service small to midsize manufacturers due to IT complexity, high costs of consultants needing to be involved, and the lack of ubiquitous connectivity to machines and sensors as promised.

Even at a Tier 1 level we will continue to see only pilot level IoT projects for the most part, the exception being more extremely complex product lines, such as Silicon Photonics assembly and test. Shifts are underway to deliver increased efficiency with reduced labor involvement by migrating to single scalable platforms that offer full digitization of the factory floor, coupled with an IoT data collection system, in order to truly automate single line to multi factory lines.

With AI/ML capabilities growing in importance, the strategy of migrating to a single platform with fully contextualized data will best serve the entire industry in order to utilize these technologies. We expect there will be growth in combined MES, IoT and edge computing platform solutions, driven by the need to deliver complete factory digitization.