A strong communications strategy for front-line employees pays big dividends.

I routinely tell clients perception is reality. Basically, your company’s brand is what your customer perceives it to be. And, as much as marketers would like to say advertising and positioning strategies influence market perception, the reality is your customers’ perceptions are more likely to be influenced by the people they deal with day-to-day at your company.

Is your program management well-informed and organized, or overworked and the last to know? What are your engineers telling your customers’ engineers? Those conversations shape your customers’ opinions on your capabilities and, often, on how much and what type of business they may award in the future.

That said, in the controlled chaos of the electronics manufacturing services (EMS) industry, companies often forget the importance of having prescribed communications processes and behaviors related to information sharing with customers and the timing of that sharing.

For BGAs it is best to start with a top-down view to look for obvious shorts and over-large voids, and then go to oblique views.

X-ray inspection, at present, requires mainly human analysis to see the flaws. This will be true perhaps unless, or until, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms provide some alternative solution. However, with so many variables in the x-ray images of assembled boards – the shapes, sizes and density of bumps and joints, the differences in pad solder coverage, the presence of internal copper traces, the overlapping internal and bottom-side components and features, etc. – obtaining an initial training set of exemplars for a ubiquitous AI solution may be tricky.

I suggest this is particularly the case when looking for opens in BGAs. By looking only at a top-down x-ray view, you may miss the fault. In previous columns, I have recommended oblique x-ray views should also be taken to separate the pad and device interfaces from each other and thus give the (human) operator the best chance to spot the open joint or other problem(s). Consider using not only an oblique angle view, but also decide what angle, or angles, are necessary and in which direction(s) around the joint those angle views should be taken.

The balancing of “intelligence” and “smart” is an age-old conundrum.

The rage these days is something called “Industry 4.0.” I have been invited to scores of presentations designed to show how Industry 4.0 is not just the next generation of manufacturing, but a must-do next step to produce higher quality product, faster, on-time, and at far less cost. Industry 4.0 sounds exciting and novel, so I have participated in webinars, attended seminars and read up on this must-do phenomenon.

Spoiler alert: It’s not all that new!

Last month, a California jury awarded a resident $289 million, finding he had developed cancer from exposure to a popular brand of herbicide.

What, you may ask, does a guy who used Roundup to kill weeds around school buildings in the San Francisco Bay area have to do with me in the printed circuit board industry?

A lot, potentially.

I had the pleasure in August of interviewing Brenda Baney for our PCB Chat podcast. As some readers may remember, Baney previously was a regular in these pages. She was an excellent columnist: knowledgeable, opinionated and articulate. After two decades at Delco, she now runs B Cubed Consulting, where she provides expert guidance on conflict minerals, RoHS and REACH product stewardship, and the International Material Data System.