ECN impact assessment

The scenario and numbers in this demonstration project are simulated data.

Industry: PCB manufacturing
What was built: Agents, skills, semantic models and write tools, built on demonstration data
Where the knowledge came from: The rules engineering CAM uses to judge a revision change, the customer's ECN email and Gerber files, plus demonstration data from the ERP, PLM, supplier portal and MES

Customer email after hours

On Friday night, a customer sends an engineering change notice (ECN). The ECN moves a part in production to a new revision, switches to a high-Tg laminate, and asks for a short lead time.
At plants like this, order entry, engineering, purchasing, scheduling and costing used to wait until Monday and sign off one after another.

When an ECN brings a new revision, engineering CAM has to judge what the design changed and whether the line is affected.
This demonstration project writes these judgements into the Gerber revision comparison skill. The engineering CAM agent uses it to compare the two revisions.
Rule: if the layer count differs between revisions, the stack-up has changed, and the change counts as major.
Rule: if the drill data differs, the drill program has to be redone, and the delivery date is affected.
Rule: if only inner-layer line width or impedance is fine-tuned, the process carries over. If the stack-up, drilling or outline changes, a new trial run is needed. If the laminate changes, the agent checks whether recertification is triggered.
Exception: when the changes the ECN declares do not match what the comparison finds, the agent flags a warning.
Purchasing rules sit in other skills. Approved vendor lookup excludes vendors that are not approved. MRP explosion and shortage calculation compares the old and new BOMs, to see whether old material can be released and whether new material is a new requirement.
A Syncer brings the customer's email and Gerber files in from Git. The agents query live numbers such as stock, quotes and capacity through semantic models on the ERP, PLM, supplier portal and MES each time.

By these rules, the agent finds that this change touches only impedance line width and the laminate, so the process carries over. The procurement, scheduling, and cost and finance agents then work out the shortage, the expedite option, the delivery date they can promise and the margin impact, and Sindri gathers them into a decision pack.
The order revision, the expedited purchase order, the work order release and the customer reply wait for the responsible people to approve them on Monday morning. Until then, nothing is written to the ERP, the supplier portal or the MES.

At plants like this, customer drawings and ECNs will keep being revised.
The agents will collect feedback on their answers from users. The feedback will go to Odin.
Wrong answers will become tests. A change will be kept only if scores improve.

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