Plus, how AI can help deal with the threats.

Forget enterprise digital transformation. For better or worse, we are digitizing the world, and it’s changing everything. The opportunities to make things better are tremendous; we can save wasted energy and natural resources, democratize access to all kinds of services, improve standards of healthcare, prevent avoidable accidents, and accelerate our transition to renewable energy. By connecting everything, and introducing AI into the mix, we can gain insights we would otherwise never detect. Moreover, we can see the effects of our own behavior and use the analysis to identify ways to improve. Earlier technologies could never have done all this for us.

But there is always an “on the other hand,” and in this case the issues relate mostly to privacy and cybersecurity. We are putting more information about ourselves than ever before into the hands of data scientists. While we can expect better shopping experiences, we are at the same time disclosing insights into ourselves, our activities, and our preferences as individuals. And if we are not giving away information directly, everything we do online (and we are almost permanently online) reinforces the accuracy of any and every inference made by the AIs that constantly watch from the cloud.

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How well does your incoming inspection team know the acceptability standards?

Does your PCB quality team inspect to pass or inspect to fail? Knowing the difference between what is rejectable in a printed circuit board and what is a nonissue is more important than ever.

Skyrocketing costs, shortages of copper and fiberglass materials, and longer delivery times mean remakes are not available as quickly as before. Rejecting PCBs for things that don’t affect the form, fit or function of the final project is simply bad business.

To be clear, I am not advocating acceptance of substandard product. IPC-A-600 standards are clear as to what is good and what is not. But thanks to lack of training or misinterpretation of industry specs, incoming PCB quality inspectors are turning away perfectly good commercial-grade boards that then must be remade.

The main culprit in this cycle of unnecessary PCB rejection and remake costs is management, which fails to provide adequate training to incoming inspectors and instills in them a fear of releasing bad product to the manufacturing floor.

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The cycle of higher unemployment and prices must be broken.

I am not an economist, but having been around the block more than a few times over the past decades, it sure looks like financial déja vu!

My career started in the mid-1970s. At that time, the economic arena was swirling from extraordinary events that, together, created the perfect storm for hyperinflation. The aftermath of the US political crisis Watergate, staggering gas lines and shortages caused by the rolling Middle East oil embargos, and questionable Federal Reserve tactics led us to double-digit inflation. At that time, I was pricing administrator for a division of a global electronic connector manufacturer. Among my responsibilities was keeping the multi-thousand-part price book up to date. This task historically was done once every one or two years. In the environment we were in, however, I was updating prices two to three times each year!

It’s with this perspective I find myself trying to read the proverbial economic tea leaves of where we are headed in 2021 and beyond.

The past couple years, like in the mid-70s, have been filled with extraordinary events. Washington has been in gridlock; tariffs are finally resulting in shifts in where product is produced and shipped; a pandemic has displaced millions of workers and sent more home to work. Manufacturing facilities are reducing onsite staff, resulting in lower output and product shortages. Governments are responding with economic stimuli in the form of direct cash to citizens, enhanced unemployment benefits for those out of work, and low-cost loans to business and industry.  

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Why does Siemens want a content company?

In an era where new packages are coming online quickly, and the number of parts available is staggering – major original component manufacturers can have more than 100,000 items on their line card – human management of all this takes supernatural powers.

And that begins to explain why Siemens is paying $700 million (what?!?) for Supplyframe and its platform for component data, sourcing, and trends.

Indeed, the real value Supplyframe brings is not just access to spec sheets and parametric data, but real-time data trends. What’s available? What’s ramping in demand? And for how long? Supplyframe says it can aggregate use patterns across its 10 million-engineer-strong database to determine answers to these and related questions. It can also drill down by sector and geography to ascertain which components are ramping or stagnating in demand. There’s obvious value in that. That scale is impressive.

Now, one could argue that even real-time data are reactive, whereas what the supply chain needs is predictive, as in forward-looking. No word as to the degree Supplyframe customers have been bowed by the intense and building pressure on component inventories over the past nine months. We’d like to know.

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