New Pick and Place Operation

I wonder what Dr. Lou ended up buying?????

reply »

Hi Pete,

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

My experiences with Mydata would differ from yours, but as in life, different machines are for different circumstances. We have many low volume customers that love them - they are easy to use, upgrade, source spares etc, cheap to aquire 2nd user machines etc.

On the flip side the build quality used to be suspect - especially the wiring, and as Grant correctly mentioned the larger Agilis Feeders do have problems (although I do like the 8mm & 12mm & think they are great), and they just aren't as accurate, repeatable, or reliable when used in higher volume applications. Then again, they were not designed for this.

Also... You can sell a customer an average product, but give him great service, and he'll think both you & the machines are wonderful. Sometimes the service is the difference - if you've got good customer loyalty & retention a lot of that credit has to go down to how you're looking after them.

Cheers,

Rob.

reply »

Pete, Please for all of us that read this forum, explain to us what Grant has said about Mydata that is not true.

I watch this forum closely and I never remember Grant saying anything about Mydata that was inaccurate.

FYI: We have had Mydata machines since the mid 90's.

Also, I am curious as to why you say there is too much B.S. on this forum. I have found this forum to be a very valuable tool.

reply »

Pete C, this forum has no value if people do not share thier real world experience. We can all do research on our own. We can all make bad decisions or good decisions based on that research because most of the data we have access to comes from the people trying to sell us the product. It would be nice if SMT magazine had equipment shootout's that told us the real accuracy or the speed or the pick reliability of all the machines out there. But they don't. This forum allows us to hear other peoples REAL experiences. It is a shame that more people dont speak up about thier experiences, good or bad. If Grant's experience is not representative of the majority of users, maybe you should encourage those people to speak up. Your comment "I have found just about everything that Grant has said about them to be wrong from my research and experience with the customers that use them." leads me to believe you only consider "research" that leads to your desired conclusion. Thats not research. He was a "customer that used them". Here you have a user that was not happy, did eveything he could to upgrade his machine (Most of it was mentioned in numerous postings here) and was not happy with the machines performance. So he is "wrong"? Maybe you should call Mydata and find out what went wrong with thier support, they had a customer they knew was unhappy and apparently could not make things right. I think Mydata makes a very good machine, for low volume fast change. That is not what Grant does, he has made that clear. He has also made positive comments about some aspects of Mydata. I was in the same possition as he was at my company and we as well went with a tier one machine. The Mydata would not have been the best choice for what we do, his feedback helped me come to this conclusion and now after the fact, we made a very good choice and I owe some credit for that decision to him. I have always been very vocal about companies that I have had great experiences with like Universal and YesTech. I have been very vocal about copmpanies I have had horrible experiencees with like Agilent with the SJ-10. But Agilent has been great with the 3070 (different group). In some casses the experiences have more to do with the people than the product, I try to keep the two seperate and make that clear. The feedback from users is important and needs to be encouraged not criticized. If your machine gets negative feedback, use that info to improve it.

reply »

I would have to disagree on this. My experience is that you should never justify capital expediture based on just the obvious up front costs alone. There is no mention of risk of recall, warranty costs, scrap costs,and so on. Which you may get from an unreliable / inconsistent machine. My experience is that these costs are usually ignored at the planning/costing stage because it may or may not happen. Its a question of risk assesment. From my experience working with drive by wire systems I would need an accurate/robust manufacturing equipment as the risk of field issues and recalls are just too great, and the margins are comparitively small. If however you are manufacturing home heating thermostat devices, with a greater profit margin, less harsh environmental requirements, the risk is a lot less and you could probably swallow the warranty/scrap costs and justify the lower capital costs. My current PCB manufacturer has justified a capable process based on around 3-4000 PPM rejected at process, giving us nearly 2000 PPM field warranty easily over $0.5M USD costs to date! They are just not used to working at the stricter quality standards of the automotive industry. In this case the Fuji machine would be fully justified in hindsight, but not at the planning stage, unless you had performed a proper assesment of the product risk.

Rob

reply »