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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“We have used this vendor for years” is not a viable strategy.

As the price of PCB materials continues to skyrocket, why are some circuit board buyers stuck firmly in the past, doing business as they always have? Why, even when paying more than they should, do they fear upsetting the apple cart?

Bare board buying can be competitive, but only if those overseeing their company’s PCB supply chain are willing to occasionally buck a system put in place years ago. For circuit board buyers and procurement managers in particular, I see three ingrained habits that do damage to a firm’s PCB purchasing program and its ability to get competitive pricing.

1. Buyers are untrained. One outdated practice in the PCB industry that always amazes me is the willingness to throw buyers into the deep end without giving them 21st century training on how to buy boards. Does management assume PCB buyers will gain all the knowledge they need on the job? Sometimes, they probably do. But often, they end up costing their companies a lot of money as they learn from their mistakes.

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How to respond to supplier price increases.

Demand for printed circuit boards is going up. But so are production costs.

Raw PCB material pricing has jumped about 40% since June, with the exact increase dependent on material type. This price increase was inevitable and is, in fact, overdue.

During the early months of the Covid crisis, most PCB suppliers were hesitant to pass on their already-increasing material costs. But as China has rebounded faster from the Covid slowdown than the US and Europe, demand for production has escalated. PCB vendors are now more willing to pass higher material costs onto their customers. And the price increases are by no means over.

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Government incentives are just part of the formula.

Government-led directives of late are aimed squarely at bringing manufacturing back to the US. President Biden recently signed an executive order requiring the federal government to buy more goods produced in the United States and limiting the ability of federal agencies to issue waivers on overseas purchases.

Earlier, then-President Trump had approved regulations that increased the share of a product’s components that must be produced domestically to qualify as US-made. He also imposed a 25% tariff on goods imported from China.

The $740 billion 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which took effect in January, includes a provision forbidding the purchase by the Department of Defense of printed circuit boards manufactured in potentially adversarial countries such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Many in our industry have welcomed this new directive as a means of rebuilding the once-robust PCB manufacturing climate in the United States.

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