Yamaha SMT confirms support of The Hermes Standard
Not long to wait
After many years of asking and receiving different answers along the way we finally have a definitive answer whether Yamaha SMT Assembly Systems will be supporting The Hermes Standard also known as IPC-HERMES-9852.
This follows us breaking the News that Europlacer would also be supporting the standard who weren't a Hermes Standard Initiative member. They seemed to be focusing their efforts on implementing sister standard; the Connected Factory Exchange.
Having produce a device to retrofit Hermes to SMEMA based equipment, known as the SMEMA Hermes Adaptor, we are often asked if Equipment X,Y,Z supports the Hermes Standard. Getting an answer from sales teams can be very difficult when they don't know the answer themselves.
Initially we received a stock answer at trade shows that Yamaha supported other data standards often found in Asia.
Only at the start of this year at the UK's Southern Manufacturing And Electronics Show, Yamaha's UK distributor Blundell stated the same and continued to state that our Adaptor wouldn't be needed as customers would replace conveyors and non-supported equipment and closed down any further conversation. It felt like 2016 all over again :(
The American Yamaha team were a lot more understanding of the situation at IPC APEX Expo 2023 and even welcomed me onto their booth for a soft drink to talk shop about the Hermes Standard and our retrofit Adaptor. Their message to me gave me hope, to paraphrase our conversation it was 'we don't currently support the Hermes Standard but it's inevitable we will in the future'.
After all the Hermes Standard is only software, equipment suppliers can support many software data standards and it gets them into the habit of not hard-coding solutions and making their software solutions more flexible.
Yamaha joined the Hermes Standard Initiative membership so I detected progress was being made and I started again to get a lot of contact from Yamaha's customer base asking about solutions to upgrades. Then seeing them promoting their support of the Connected Factory Exchange on a LinkedIn I asked the question once again and I was pleasantly surprised to receive the reply:
The IPC-Hermes 9852 hasn't been released yet, but it's in progress.
The ETA is scheduled for Q4 2025.
YAMAHA ROBOTICS EMEA, LinkedIn
What this mean in practice we don't know. Europlacer honoured their word and supports the Hermes Standard on their latest Screen Printer the ii-P7. I was able to see the Printer in-person at the start of the year at the Farnborough trade show.
From my observations it seemed to support Hermes 1.1 and I encouraged the sales team to improve this by supporting at least 1.4 so data isn't lost between machines. We operate so close to Upton, Dorset, England where the Printers are manufactured, so we also offered them our knowledge and a show & tell of our Adaptor if they invited us in, to speed up the rollout.
It's still unclear if Europlacer will offer Hermes support for older equipment and it's been a big sticking point with UK customers as Europlacer has a large coverage of SMEs here.
So I have the same questions for Yamaha.
Ideally all equipment should be supported, and in the true spirit of the Hermes Standard Initiative, Free of Charge. Fingers Crossed, 2026 is looking a promising year for the Standard.
About 4IR.UK British Systems
We are a Smart Factory solutions provider for the SMT Electronics Assembly manufacturing industry. We were founded in 2016 after the support of a seed funded Business Accelerator. We create hardware Adaptors that operate in more than 20 countries that extend the life of SMEMA based manufacturing equipment by providing solutions for production monitoring and supporting data connections to the Hermes Standard and the Connected Factory Exchange CFX. We also develop Software Extensions for the Low-Code No-Code MultiPlug Edge Computing Platform. The flexibility of off-the-shelf software combined with inside industrial experience means that 4IR.UK is ideally placed to anticipate and respond to a factory's changing needs.
