Nine critical checks for OEMs to avoiding bottlenecks.

Established OEMs with ambitious growth goals often hit a wall as they expand their product ranges. Internal design and development (D&D) teams become overloaded while juggling updates to legacy products, managing lifecycles and integrating new features. Meanwhile, mounting pressure to innovate and accelerate time-to-market for new products adds to the challenges.

For many, the answer is clear: outsource D&D. But choosing the right partner is anything but straightforward. This is the tipping point. OEMs often need to work fast to choose a D&D partner or face a vicious cycle of competing demands and delays that impact revenue (Figure 1).

Somewhere between the badge scanner beep and missing business cards, community happens.

I’ve been reading to my son before bed lately. And now that we’ve (mercifully) graduated from the picture book phase, I did what any overexcited parent with a bookshelf full of “classics” would do: I went straight for the big ones. Peter Pan. Alice in Wonderland. The Secret Garden.

I quickly realized, somewhere around my third dramatic reading of a particularly dense sentence, that perhaps I was a little too eager. I was narrating stories with words he wasn’t quite ready for yet, piling on adventures that made more sense to me than to him.

Boards aren’t the only things getting more complex. Workloads are too.

PCB designers are, by and large, a veteran crew. Many have been in the game for decades, steadily turning out increasingly complex boards while titles and org charts shift around them.

Avoiding solder paste failures through proper handling and preparation.

Our technical support team often sees the same preventable issues repeat themselves. Three times this week alone, I traced the root cause of a solder paste problem back to using paste straight out of the refrigerator without warming it up. In each case, once the user followed proper handling procedures, the problem resolved itself.