Cost and availability of spare parts are of considerate interest to anyone who currently owns a piece of capital equipment or anyone contemplating to purchase a piece of capital equipment.
Understanding Inventory Availability
Original equipment manufacturers often use many off-the-shelf components or slightly customized versions of off-the-shelf components. Use of such components helps keep costs low and sometimes increases rapid advances in technology and performance. For example, consider the rapid advances in feature set and performance of consumer PCs, CPUs, and complete operating systems.
However, the use of off-the-shelf components has a downside as well because some components can have short life cycles. Examples of off-the-shelf components with short life cycles include: flat screen monitors, PC mother boards, PC CPUs and even operating systems. Sometimes when components become obsolete, replacement with an alternate off-the-shelf component can require costly engineering, system redesign, test, and validation. At other times it is simply not possible to replace an obsolete component with another off-the-shelf component because technology has moved on and alternate off-the-shelf components simply do not exist.
An example of this is the motors on an automated bonder—where the motors used on the system were once state of the art, the motor technology has progressed and drop-in replacements with similar performance are simply not as widely available. Further, the vintage control system on the bonder may not be as flexible as that of a comparable yet newer bonder model. Another example is bonder control systems. Newer control systems can easily be tuned to motors with different performances, although the same is not true of the vintage control systems. The solution could be a custom-made motor, which means higher costs and lead times.
|
Trading in a Vintage Bonder |
 |
Managing Spare Parts
The end user needs to be aware of the challenges of maintaining a supply of spare parts, as well as the likely increase in cost and lead time for spare parts particularly late in the life cycle of a given product model. This is doubly true if purchasing a used machine which is no longer in production. Service contracts are one means to manage cost and availability of spare parts for older equipment.
|
Manufacturing-based industries always run the risk of part and component obsolesce. Staying proactive by communicating with your equipment service team about part inventory and available upgrades—either covered in contracts or a-la-carte—will render longer equipment life spans. |
 |
Managing Costs With a Certified Refurbished Bonders
While the easiest solution could be to continually purchase the latest technologies and bonder systems, this is not always the best approach for purchasing managers due to the often high costs of capital equipment. In this instance, the best alternative can be purchasing a certified refurbished bonder, or to trade-up an older model for credit towards the latest technology.
|
Look for a manufacturer who offers easy and intuitive ways to order spare parts. Keep in mind that factory-refurbished and used equipment from a third-party vendor can be a high risk purchase, especially if the price sounds too good to be true. These third-party organizations sell their equipment “as is” with no further support once the bonder is purchased. Seek out a vendor who offers service support and maintenance plans for the refurbished or used equipment—be sure to ask a lot of questions! |
 |
Learn More
Palomar Technologies offers a Bonder Buy-Back Program for 3500 Die Bonder owners to upgrade their production on the ultra-flexible 3800 Die Bonder. The transition to a 3800 offers a fiscally sound solution for those with older systems wishing to reach the next level of die attach technology.
----
Allan Hass
Director of Engineering
Palomar Technologies, Inc.