Striking the right balance between costs and cycle time.

Decisions made in product design can impact assembly cost, defect opportunities and inventory cost. While design for manufacturability (DfM) analysis can eliminate many issues, less commonly analyzed decisions related to cost targets, scheduling and work team assignments can have unintended consequences that generate unacceptable levels of waste.

Lean manufacturing practitioners are aware of Taiichi Ohno’s concept of the seven wastes (muda) in manufacturing as part of the Toyota Production System (TPS). To recap, those seven wastes are:

1. Waste of overproducing (no immediate need for product being produced).
2. Waste of waiting (idle time between operations).
3. Waste of transport (product moving more than necessary).
4. Waste of processing (doing more than what is necessary).
5. Waste of inventory (excess above what was required).
6. Waste of motion (any motion not necessary outside of production).
7. Waste of defects (producing defects requiring rework).

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The pandemic created a unique environment for finding talented employees.

Looking back about a year ago, the challenge that kept you awake at night was people. More precisely, where and how to find people to hire – people with talent, a work ethic and interest in a long-term career manufacturing electronics. 2020, of course, has brought a slew of new concerns, and made us adaptable to what is described as the "new normal." But surprise! Right up there with how many face masks, hand sanitizer and Plexiglas partitions are available in the stockroom, staffing remains the major concern for business leaders.

The focus on people certainly has taken some twists and turns through this year. During the first six months, many were focused on how to retain the workforce they had. To be sure, potential health issues, social distancing, work-from-home protocols and other necessary obstacles displaced new talent acquisition, and jolting headlines on unemployment claims, especially in the hospitality and retail sectors, forced business leaders to consider when the next shoe would drop and the order board would dry up. Thankfully – or maybe luckily – most manufacturing, and especially electronics manufacturing, has remained surprisingly “normal,” and customers, employees and suppliers have recalibrated as necessary.

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More than 160 years ago, eons before Facebook and Twitter were conceived, a pair of candidates to represent Illinois in the US Senate engaged in a series of debates. As they barnstormed their way around the state, incumbent Democrat Stephen Douglas and his Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln faced off in the heat and rain in front of thousands of citizens.

Known today as The Great Debates of 1858, the respective candidates used the time to frame their positions on the leading issues of the day.

When this issue hits inboxes and mailboxes, this year’s US presidential election will (hopefully) be determined. Among the revelations of the just-ended race is that the format for the presidential debates is all wrong.

No one will mistake President Trump or his challenger, Joe Biden, for Douglas and Lincoln. Their predecessors had erudition and wide-ranging oratorical skills that seem quaint in today’s era of tweets and sound bites. But the format bears revival.

That’s because no matter who your preferred candidate is, the structure of the debates is inherently allergic to communicating the real issues.

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Can we build on past successes of cost and task sharing?

Much attention is focused on the importance of boosting electronics manufacturing in the US, but in a recent interview, Emmanuel Sabonnadiere, CEO of CEA-Leti, called R&D the roots of the tree of manufacturing. What a great analogy. Without successful R&D in the electronics industry, successful manufacturing is not possible. Creating the best ecosystem to foster R&D is key.

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