Launching New Digital Traveler is the Key First Step

In honor of Earth Day 2022, Advanced Assembly is proud to announce an initiative to become a paperless PCB assembly facility by the end of 2022. The first step in achieving this goal is the launch of the company’s new digital traveler.

A traveler is a list of steps that follows a PCB project from machine to machine and person to person inside the assembly factory. This detailed checklist provides custom instructions unique to each printed circuit board build.

Transforming paper travelers to a digital format required approximately five months of effort from Advanced Assembly’s process engineering team. The challenges of the project included finding innovative ways to verify information at each manufacturing step, allowing multiple users access, tracking version history, and logging changes.

“Each traveler was about four printed pages,” said Gabe Kelly-Ramirez, process engineer and project lead at Advanced Assembly. “Not only does going digital reduce the company’s paper consumption, but it will help Advanced Assembly aggregate and analyze project data in a way that was previously unavailable. The ability to use data for smarter decision-making is what I’m most excited about.”

With the new digital traveler system, Advanced Assembly will be able to analyze assembly data in total and by the job. Benefits of this the new information include:

• Creating efficiency models based on throughput length at each station.
• Continuous quality improvements by eliminating the potential for defects within each process step.
• Faster turn-times by allowing multiple users to access the instructions contained within the digital traveler.
• Reduced chance for human error with automatic updates

All of these upgrades will result in even faster turn-times and higher quality PCB assemblies for customers.

The digital traveler is only one of Advanced Assembly’s sustainable manufacturing projects. To be completely paperless by the end of the year, the company also plans to eliminate the practice of production order printing.

For a list of other programs supporting the company’s environmental stewardship, visit https://aapcb.com/environment.