Employee recruitment and retention require an active company effort.

It’s no secret that a tight labor market is an issue in all segments of the electronics manufacturing services (EMS) industry. A large part of this is the result of manufacturing offshoring trends. When I entered the workforce, I had friends and relatives who worked or had worked in manufacturing-related careers, influencing my choice to work for an EMS company. That isn’t the case today.

A few years ago, I participated in a local manufacturing awareness day targeted at high school students participating in their schools’ robotics programs. I put together a short video that illustrated manufacturing processes and careers in the EMS industry. Even students interested in engineering careers weren’t thinking about manufacturing engineering or hardware engineering. Most were focused on software engineering with an eye on getting jobs at Google or some other highly visible tech employer.

Small differences can have big consequences.

For as long as there have been printed circuit boards, the nominal thickness seems to have been set at 0.062″ – or in Latin, 1.5748mm, but call it 1.6mm for short. In practical terms, the standard dielectric materials available support this board thickness while providing anything from two to 20 layers. I imagine four layers is still the most common use case.

Larger boards will need more connections and require more stiffness. To manage connectivity and flatness requirements, standard PCB thickness targets ratchet up to 2.4mm and 3.2mm. On the low side we find 1.0mm and go down to 0.8mm. All these targets are related to using so-called gold fingers as a printed edge connector.

It’s about connectivity and solderability. This was handed down from the backplane and daughtercard configurations found in our tower computer systems. The motherboard has expansion sockets and the memory cards come with fingers to plug and play. As a result of this variety, many connector vendors that market to plated through-hole technology users will offer different pin lengths that fit the range of board thickness options.

The humble printed circuit board continues to change to meet new demands.

Power is nothing without control. It’s not a quote by a famous politician or social commentator, or even Mark Twain. It’s an advertising slogan for car tires. But it’s also an apt description of the opportunities for our industry that are now happening as part of the green energy transition.

Electrification is one of today’s dominant megatrends. The “old way” of releasing energy from traditional fuels by explosions and burning is giving way to alternatives like electromagnetic and photovoltaic conversion, as well as chemical processes inside batteries and fuel cells. Taking the utmost care of every joule is critical to maximize the harvest from the scarce ambient energy sources and to minimize waste throughout the conversion system, distribution infrastructure, storage and – ultimately – the load.

Exercising that care demands control. This is where more power electronics are being employed to ensure efficient and precise conversion as we accelerate the pace of electrification; changing traditional mechanical, hydraulic, and fossil-fueled tools and vehicles that we have all become accustomed to using into electrical equivalents that can be powered from clean and sustainable energy. Replacing conventional boilers with electric heat pumps for heating buildings is one example.

Getting a grip on the many moving parts.

Much of my time this decade has been spent supporting private equity (PE) firms considering an investment in the EMS space, with no prior EMS experience on their staff. Those of us who have spent years in this space know there are vast amounts of "moving parts" involved with running a solid EMS business.

I've been told that my audits and SWOT writeups proved to be very valuable, provided accurate insight into a business the potential investors knew very little about and reduced previously unknown risks that would have crept into the deals.

Many similarities exist among the audits I've conducted over the past few years. Many of these findings would not surprise EMS industry veterans. But these situations may not be self-evident to an investor who hasn't previously worked in this complex service industry. I have also seen many of these elements of risk at my direct EMS clients managed to different degrees of efficiency.

Some questions/topics to consider before making any investment decision include: