Just as Covid-19 jolted supply chains, it also disrupted how we communicate.

Maintaining effective, open, timely communication can be one of the biggest challenges facing employees at every level. The executive team sets the vision, strategy and tactical goals. Managers and supervisors are tasked with communicating and converting that message into understandable, reasonable, attainable and ultimately successful initiatives and efforts. Employees, in turn, communicate their issues, problems and ideas to accomplish back to the higher-ups, who refine the goals, so the organization moves forward profitably, satisfying customers.

On normal days, good communications can be daunting and complex. And the past several months have been anything but normal.

In-person communication offers the advantage of body language to accentuate the spoken word. The parties involved can literally see eye-to-eye. A speaker can scan a room to see how their message is received and recalibrate as needed. Workers can lean back from their desk or stand over a cubicle wall to ask a colleague a question and receive a quick response. A team can huddle on demand to communicate a problem and brainstorm a solution. How does that work when you and your staff are forced to communicate virtually?

Organic solderability preservatives, or, if you prefer, organic surface protectants, or OSPs, have been with us for decades. Did you know more than 60% of the world’s boards use OSPs? They are in everything from smartphones to tablets to medical devices, airbags, and engine controls.

Major OEMs like Intel, Apple, Cisco, Continental, Bosch, Denso, and Hitachi Automotive are known to use them. Yet when engineers discuss their preferred finishes, OSPs tend to be on the outside looking in.

A new IPC task group is trying to bring an added layer of credibility to OSPs for high-temperature soldering by developing a standard, along with a series of test methods.

At a glance, OSPs have ample potential. Compared to metallic finishes, they are low-cost and offer much-sought-after surface coplanarity on the coated copper pads. They emerged in the 1980s as a replacement for hot air solder leveling, which was an omnipresent but more expensive, higher maintenance process. Because of their ability to produce thin, even coatings, OSPs seemed superior for assemblers working with advanced packages, and in some cases OSPs cut the cost of the finish up to 50% over HASL and even more versus finishes containing gold or silver. Major OEMs like Lucent adopted OSPs for a large percentage of their boards.

With travel frozen, rethink and repurpose those marketing dollars.

By making face-to-face sales calls impossible, Covid-19 is challenging electronics manufacturing services (EMS) salespeople to work in new ways. Sadly, that challenge isn’t likely to go away soon. On the bright side, it opens the door to a more productive, less costly sales and OEM relationship, provided salespeople modify their approach.

In the normal flow of EMS selling, there is typically a lead follow-up phase that results in a face-to-face sales call. There may be an additional meeting to present a quotation, depending on the distance between the salesperson and decision-maker. There is also usually a plant tour. When all these activities are local, costs drop to the amount of time the individuals spend on the activity. However, the cost of a sales call that involves business travel may be $1,000 to $2,000, depending on mode of travel and how many sales calls are clustered into that trip.

Multitasking platforms are becoming the standard.

While productivity – manufacturing more product, more efficiently in less time – has been center stage in electronics assembly for decades, today’s razor-thin margins, coupled with the requirement for limited human intervention, have put an exclamation point on managing output proficiency. (This is especially true as the world restricts building access and maintains safe personal distances.) An optimized stencil printing process, as I’ve said many times, comes down to depositing the right volume in the right place at the right time. These are the three pillars of the print operation. Ultimately, for maximum productivity, a manufacturing operation needs a stencil printer that is always available and, when it is available, efficient and reliable.

It wasn’t long ago the bottleneck on the production line was usually the placement machine, so the stencil printer was generally available and had plenty of time to run the print routine. With recent modular approaches to manufacturing line setups, however, this is no longer the case. Placement platforms have exponentially improved speed. The printer now must maintain a much faster pace; this starts with mechanics and cycle time. In mass production settings, getting a printer down to a core cycle time of five seconds has become a necessity.