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.

With no standard in sight, emerging alloys require unique fluxes and processes.

Soldering in nitrogen or vapor phase environments can increase the likelihood.

Subtle component lifting can be an issue to find during inspection. Most modern AOI systems should be able to detect drawbridging on small passive and active parts. Old systems may struggle with defects like the two shown in FIGURE 1.