Cost pressure once again may become the industry’s biggest driver of change.

Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. Well, I am not sure necessity is the mother of all invention, but it can definitely be tied to a whole bunch, and probably has more than a few still to birth.

The current US board market is spookier than it seems.

The email confirmation hits your inbox: Order Received. Status: In Process.

For a procurement manager or lead engineer, that notification usually triggers a dopamine hit. It’s the sound of progress. You’ve successfully navigated the internal approvals, you’ve selected a domestic vendor to avoid the headache of customs and the sting of new tariffs, and you’ve kept your supply chain close to home. You have done everything right.

The six functions every successful NPI needs.

A recent exchange on LinkedIn about the EMS industry got me thinking about the many good, bad and ugly NPI processes I have been part of or audited over the years. While there is no one right answer to launching first articles in the EMS space, far too many unrepeatable and inefficient NPI processes are “time eaters,” enabling first-article failures and taking the NPI team away from their day-to-day duties. This month, we examine some basic principles to consider if your NPI process is not consistent from NPI launch #1 to NPI launch #100.

Hope that nothing will interrupt imports of PCBs and parts is not a strategy.

There’s a crisis in our industry that few want to talk about and even fewer want to admit. It’s not a quality crisis. It’s not a pricing crisis. It’s not even a technology crisis. It’s a dependency crisis, and it threatens our companies, our customers and our country.